The global antibodies market is projected at over US$200 billion and growing strongly. Finding antibodies that bind to currently complex, “undruggable” targets, such as GPCRs and ion channels, remains slow, costly and failure-prone. While about 220 disease-linked GPCRs remain undrugged, there are only three FDA-approved antibodies against GPCRs, representing a major unmet need.
Antiverse solves this by combining AI-driven design with lab validation to create novel, functional antibodies from scratch. Their platform rapidly delivers high-affinity, human-compatible antibodies for difficult targets, dramatically accelerating early drug discovery
Ben Holland is Antiverse’s CTO and co-founder, leading the core technology strategy and R&D operations. He also works closely with the CEO on business development, partnerships, and fundraising, as well as managing the engineering and discovery teams in Cardiff and globally. As Antiverse grows they are expanding the team and the platform, deepening pharma collaborations and preparing internal assets alongside our partnership work.
The Shott Scale Up Accelerator’s tailored support for leadership growth, governance and strategic expansion will help Ben transition away from a being-everywhere, hands-on founder and towards being a strategic leader. He wants to build a senior leadership team he can rely upon, develop effective management practices and learn the practical skills of managing growth phases. He sees the Shott Scale Up Accelerator’s mentoring and coaching to sharpen his communication and board-level presentation skills, build confidence in delegating work and managing a leadership team. He also recognises that: “I have always found peer networking extremely powerful and look forward to learning from other scaling deep-tech firms.”
Over the next year Ben’s key milestones for Antiverse include delivering the next key AI innovation in this space and embedding robust operational systems, while shifting into repeatable, scalable platform delivery while retaining an agile, startup style R&D culture. They have also started engaging in S Korea and Japan and are currently closing a VC round.
