AP News / EIN Presswire · Feb 2026
Abalone Bio and Mount Sinai announced peer-reviewed preclinical data on first publicly reported functional characterization of CB2 activating antibody agonists, AB120 and AB150.
We create activating antibodies to treat diseases others can’t.
Company research
Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals
Overview
Abalone Bio is a private biotechnology company using engineered biology and machine learning to discover and design target-activating antibodies for hard-to-drug membrane proteins, especially GPCRs.
Primary product
FAST (Functional Antibody Selection Technology) platform for discovering and designing activating antibody therapeutics
Founded
2017
Headquarters
Emeryville, California, United States
Team size
11-50
Industry
Biotechnology Research
Sub-industry
Antibody drug discovery / therapeutic biotechnology
Offices
Emeryville, California, United States
Richmond, California, United States
Business model
Develop internal therapeutics
Partner with pharmaceutical companies for target-specific antibody discovery
Funding
Stage
Seed
Total raised
$9.1M
Latest round
Seed · Jan 2022
People & investors
Leadership
Co-founder and CEO
Chief Scientific Officer
VP of Antibody Discovery
Lauren Schwimmer
VP of Preclinical Development
Sameer Soi
VP of Data Science & AI
Nathan Caffo
Board Member
Neil Berkley
Board Member
Richard Shen
Board Member
Founders
Gustavo Pesce
Co-founder, Founding CSO
Work & culture
The company emphasizes kindness, kaizen, and ambition, and describes itself as highly collaborative and fun.
Compensation
Public job posts mention competitive salary, stock options, and equity, plus insurance and 401K match; no public salary bands were found.
Benefits
Competitive salary
Stock options
Health insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
401K and company match
Generous paid time off
Close to public transportation
Product & market
Pricing
Not publicly disclosed; appears to combine internal drug development with partnership/collaboration revenue.
Differentiators
- —Measures antibody function at large scale rather than binding alone
- —Uses proprietary large activity datasets to train ML models
- —Focuses on hard-to-drug membrane targets like GPCRs and ion channels
- —Claims first predicted functional antibody activator sequences for a GPCR target
- —Supports both internal therapeutics and pharma partnerships
Technology
Engineered yeast cells
Synthetic biology
NGS (next-generation sequencing)
Machine learning
Large language models
Structural biology
Computational selection
AI-powered antibody design
GraphPad Prism
Customers
Pharmaceutical partners
Research collaborators
Internal therapeutic programs
Competitors
Antibody discovery biotech companies
AI-enabled drug discovery companies
GPCR-targeting therapeutic platforms
Scale & contact
Estimated revenue
$0-$1M
Latest news
EIN Presswire · Jan 2026
Abalone Bio announced a collaboration with Pfizer applying its FAST platform to discover GPCR activity-modulating antibodies for an undisclosed target.
LinkedIn · Jan 2026
Company LinkedIn post announcing the Pfizer research collaboration using FAST.
LinkedIn · Dec 2025
Company post advertising Emeryville hiring and mentioning competitive pay, equity, and 401k match.
EIN Presswire · Mar 2025
Abalone Bio announced a collaboration with UPenn to develop antibody-based obesity drugs leveraging its functional antibody discovery platform.
Jobs and careers at Abalone Bio
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