He wrote high-frequency trading code, automated Thermo Fisher's gene synthesis, and now runs an AI antibody company out of Cardiff and Boston. Antiverse designs biologics for the targets everyone else gives up on.
Portrait: Murat Tunaboylu, photographed for Asians in Tech, 2021. He runs Antiverse from Cardiff, Wales and Boston, Massachusetts.
Murat Tunaboylu is the co-founder and CEO of Antiverse, an AI-native biologics company that in March 2026 closed a $9.3M Series A and, in the same week, signed a research agreement with the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation to design antibodies against the extracellular region of CFTR - a protein that has resisted this class of drug for decades.
The company is headquartered at sbarc|spark, the research campus attached to Cardiff University, with a smaller US office in Boston. It employs about 38 people. Its stated claim - that its platform can move from a chosen target to an optimized therapeutic antibody in about four months - is either quietly reasonable or, if you have worked in antibody discovery for any length of time, faintly absurd. Antiverse's investors, Soulmates Ventures leading, appear to have concluded the former.
Tunaboylu did not come to any of this through the usual door. He is a Turkish electrical engineer by training, a computer engineer by degree, a software developer by trade. His early career was spent building high-frequency trading systems - a domain that rewards, among other things, obsessive patience for automation. He then moved into biology through the side door most engineers use, which is machinery. He built cell-imaging software and lab robots for cancer research. He automated Thermo Fisher Scientific's gene synthesis workflows as a Senior Developer in the company's Synthetic Biology Manufacturing Execution Systems group. When people ask what qualifies him to run an antibody company, the answer is: twelve years of shipping software into wet labs.
Antiverse focuses on protein classes that antibody people describe as "challenging" and everyone else describes as impossible. G-protein-coupled receptors and ion channels have small, wobbly, membrane-embedded epitopes that classical antibody discovery does badly against. This is the target list Antiverse chose, deliberately.
The platform combines generative AI models trained on antibody sequence and structural data with the company's own cell-line engineering and deep sequencing wet lab. Rather than screen enormous naive libraries and hope, Antiverse designs libraries against a specific epitope, filters for high humanness, optimizes for target affinity and physiochemical properties, and clusters candidates on multiple parameters. The intended output is a small, diversified panel of drug-like antibodies for a target that would otherwise take years to attack.
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation agreement is a useful reality check on the pitch. CFTR is a transmembrane ion channel, the protein at the heart of cystic fibrosis, and its extracellular loops are famously ungenerous to antibody binding. A foundation with a fifty-year record of picking drug programs does not sign research deals casually. It signed one with a Welsh startup led by a former Thermo Fisher software lead.
Tunaboylu's public origin story for Antiverse is uncharacteristically direct for a founder. Once he had decided to start a company, he said in a text interview with the writer Lowell Thompson, it helped that he was "in an ecosystem where there is a plethora of accelerators, funding, and potential co-founders." That ecosystem was Cardiff, which is not the answer most founders give. He co-founded Antiverse with Ben Holland - an Oxford-trained engineer who co-developed what the company describes as the world's first antibody generator - and they built the team from there.
Before Antiverse, Tunaboylu had a short stint as a Venture Founder at Deep Science Ventures, the London deep-tech company builder, and had co-founded a consultancy called Svarlight. These are not household names. They are what you find on the CV of an engineer who was already, quietly, planning to start something.
Founders reveal a lot in their influence lists. Asked whom he admired, Tunaboylu named four people:
He could have run this from Boston or Cambridge. He chose sbarc|spark, a research campus in Wales. The Boston office came later. The map is the strategy.
Asked what he found most rewarding, he named "finding the co-founders I have" and the feeling of working on something you believe in. No mention of revenue.
Before designing antibodies, he built the software layer that let Thermo Fisher's gene synthesis lines run at scale. Hard-won intuition about wet lab throughput lives in Antiverse's platform.
A talk worth searching out: Tunaboylu on the founder podcast circuit discussing Antiverse's two-year fundraise, hiring a distributed team, and using ML in biotech.
Co-founder and CEO of Antiverse, an AI-driven biotech designing de novo antibodies for hard targets like GPCRs and ion channels.
BSc in Electrical Engineering at Yildiz Technical University; MSc in Computer Engineering at Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi, both in Turkey.
High-frequency trading systems, cell-imaging software and lab robots, and Senior Developer for Synthetic Biology MES at Thermo Fisher Scientific.
More than $20M in total, including a $9.3M Series A in March 2026 led by Soulmates Ventures.
Cardiff, Wales, at sbarc|spark, with an office in Boston, Massachusetts.