Prolific Machines Announces $50M Series B2 Initial Close

Patrick Soon-Shiong's involvement with Prolific Machines now reaches from the boardroom into a portfolio of potential manufacturing applications. As Nant Capital co-leads the biotechnology company's new financing, NantWorks has agreed to collaborate on biologic programs across its health and life sciences companies. That pairing gives the Emeryville, California business a particularly useful relationship: financial backing alongside a route toward applying its technology.

Prolific announced the initial closing of its $50M Series B2 on October 14, 2026, led by Atoms & Bits and Nant Capital. The company says its cumulative funding now exceeds $100M; it has not separately disclosed the proceeds of this initial closing. The capital supports a broader rollout of technology that uses light to regulate protein production inside living cells, with implications for the way pharmaceutical manufacturers develop and run their processes.

What the Series B2 brings into the business

The financing comes with two board appointments: Soon-Shiong, the founder of NantWorks, and James Stewart, founder of Level One Fund and Atoms & Bits. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Mayfield, SOSV and Fonterra's venture arm also participated. Wilson Sonsini, which advised Prolific on patent and trademark matters related to the transaction, confirms the initial-close announcement and the two lead investors.

The closing language deserves to travel with the headline. Prolific has announced an initial closing within a $50M Series B2 financing, while leaving the first tranche's proceeds unspecified. Its reported lifetime funding figure is a company disclosure, rather than a total readers should rebuild by adding every historical headline. Earlier announcements include financing instruments and differently described round stages, making that shortcut unreliable.

The use of proceeds has a fairly practical center. Prolific plans to expand its team, develop its technology and scale programs across novel biologics, biosimilars and viral vectors. It also identifies early work toward tissue and organ fabrication. For a prospective pharmaceutical partner, the immediately relevant part is the ability to support more programs through Prolific's Bay Area campus and its contract development and manufacturing organization network. The investment pays for capacity to deliver a system that has to work within someone else's manufacturing requirements.

Giving a production team another control

Optogenetics uses proteins that respond to light to influence cellular behavior. Prolific combines engineered cell lines with illumination hardware and process optimization so that gene expression can be adjusted during production. In plain terms, the manufacturer gets another way to influence when a cell makes a protein and how strongly it does so. The light supplies an instruction; it is not feeding the cells through photosynthesis.

That distinction connects the technology to a familiar process-design problem. A cell's growth and its output of a desired protein place different demands on the production system. The ability to adjust expression timing lets a development team consider growth and production separately, then tune the process around the molecule it wants. Prolific describes its illumination systems as compatible with existing bioreactors, keeping installed equipment inside the customer's purchasing decision.

Compatibility still leaves meaningful engineering work. In its technical explanation, the company describes modeling and small-scale experiments to fit illumination to a partner's reactor and process. Cell density, media and wavelength affect how light reaches the culture. That work makes the commercial offering more substantial than a lighting accessory: the engineered cell, the signal and the process have to function together. A manufacturing team would evaluate the resulting productivity and quality within its own application, where an attractive platform claim becomes a specific production decision.

From cultivated meat to pharmaceutical infrastructure

Deniz Kent, CEO, and Max Huisman, CTO, founded Prolific with Declan Jones in 2020. The company's account of its origins begins with cultivated meat and follows the team into a wider set of biological products. That history matters because the commercial direction has become more focused even as the underlying control technology retains broader possible uses. Today's business is asking pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to reconsider how they manufacture proteins.

The current leadership page places Kent and Huisman alongside scientific, operating and commercial executives. Building a product for this market requires those disciplines to meet inside the customer's development process. The hardware must fit the facility, the biological system must express the intended molecule, and the service relationship must help a partner move the work forward. The new board members enter a business where product performance and delivery capacity remain closely connected.

Prolific says the funding will expand programs with several top-20 pharmaceutical companies and multiple biotechs. Those statements establish the company's account of demand without supplying named customer economics or a revenue figure. Its commercial model includes services and licensing, giving partners different ways to engage as their programs develop. The opportunity is to make the same control approach useful across distinct manufacturing settings, while doing the application-specific work each setting requires.

How the NantWorks collaboration changes the conversation

NantWorks gives the financing a relationship with a defined industrial destination. The two companies intend to apply Prolific's platform across biologic programs within the NantWorks health and life sciences portfolio. For Prolific, that can put its cell-control technology into conversations about particular programs and manufacturing needs. For the portfolio companies, it creates a channel for evaluating a different production approach through an agreed collaboration.

The announced relationship does not disclose purchase commitments, license payments or guaranteed production volumes. Its strategic value is the connection between technology development and potential use across a portfolio. That is a useful way to read this round: an investor and its associated operating ecosystem can bring knowledge of the work that follows financing, alongside the capital needed to support it. The eventual economics will emerge from the programs and agreements themselves. The same interest in improving pharmaceutical production also runs through DevCuration's coverage of Multiply Labs' robotic biomanufacturing systems, which approach factory operations through automation.

Prolific's hiring page currently includes analytical, hardware, optical, software and project-management roles. Those openings make the expansion plan tangible without revealing a promised headcount. As the company adds capacity, the NantWorks collaboration provides a set of biological applications around which scientists, engineers and manufacturing teams can organize the next phase of work. The relationship will develop through the individual processes they choose to build together.