Waypoint Bio Raises $20M in Series A Funding Led by Amplify Partners

The round also saw participation from General Catalyst, Time BioVentures, Mitsui Global Investments, Lux Capital, and Hummingbird Ventures. In conjunction with the funding, Elliot Hershberg joined the company’s board.

The company plans to use the funding to advance its lead candidate, WAY-103, into clinical trials, move its WAY-200 colorectal cancer program closer to clinical development, and further expand its spatial biology and computational research platform.

Waypoint Bio is developing next-generation in vivo CAR T cell therapies using a platform that combines artificial intelligence, computer vision, and spatial screening technologies. Its lead program, WAY-103, is being developed for gastric and pancreatic cancers and has shown significantly stronger effectiveness in animal studies compared with several existing clinical benchmarks while reducing unwanted side effects.

WAY-103 was discovered and optimized using large-scale screening methods that analyze how treatment candidates interact with the tumor environment. This approach helps the company identify promising new therapies earlier, reduce development risk, and costs, and generate valuable data to improve future AI-driven drug discovery efforts.

Waypoint Bio combines its AI powered drug discovery platform with a clinical development strategy focused on quickly testing promising therapies in human studies. The company aims to move its strongest candidates into clinical trials faster to determine which treatments have the best chance of succeeding in patients.

According to co-founder and CEO Xinchen Wang, AI can generate many potential drug candidates, but real-world testing is essential to identify which ones work in humans. Waypoint uses AI and spatial screening technologies to design and evaluate therapies, then advances the most promising programs into early clinical trials. The company's goal is to develop innovative medicines that can become leaders in their treatment categories.

“Spatial biology has really picked up over the past few years because you can finally measure how your therapeutic candidates affect different local environments and cell-cell interactions,” said David Phizicky, co-founder and CSO of Waypoint Bio. “This is critical for most complex diseases and especially solid tumors, where simple readouts like tumor size can't capture immunosuppressive signaling and infiltration barriers - and we have a way to screen at scale for these spatial phenotypes. We're solving not only for the T cell biology, but also interactions within the tumor microenvironment, and how the in vivo delivery vector affects all of this."

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"As AI models become better at generating ideas the scarce resource is experimental systems that tell you which designs actually matter," said Elliot Hershberg, Partner at Amplify Partners. Waypoint combines AI generated assets with spatially resolved in vivo evaluation and a path to rapid clinical readouts. We think that combination compounds over time."

About Waypoint Bio

Founded in 2021 by Xinchen Wang and David Phizicky, Waypoint Bio develops AI-designed therapies using a platform that combines artificial intelligence, computer vision and spatial screening technologies. Its lead program is an in vivo CAR T therapy paired with a proprietary lentiviral vector, with the first clinical studies in China expected to begin in late 2026.

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