Kanvas Biosciences Closes $48M Series A Funding

Kanvas Biosciences, a spatial biology company headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, has closed a USD 48 million Series A to advance its microbiome-based immuno-oncology pipeline, bringing total funding to USD 78 million.

The round was co-led by existing investors DCVC and Lions Capital LLC, with participation from the Gates Foundation, ATHOS KG, Germin8, Ki Tua Fund, Pangaea Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Boutique Venture Partners, Cornell University, FemHealth Ventures, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Red Bear Ventures, RIT Venture Fund, Triple Impact Capital, Kicker Ventures, and Uncommon Denominator. The company said proceeds will fund clinical trials for its lead candidate KAN-001 and support commercial partnerships built around its spatial imaging and manufacturing platform for live biotherapeutic product (LBP) development. The Series A follows a July 2024 extension round of USD 12.5 million, which itself followed a USD 12 million Pre-Series A closed in June 2023.

Kanvas is developing microbiome-based LBPs for cancer patients who do not respond to immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs). The company's lead asset, KAN-001, is designed for solid organ cancer patients who fail to respond to ICI therapy — a population representing a substantial unmet need given that, while more than 50% of solid organ cancer patients receive ICIs, only around 10% achieve complete responses. KAN-001 is intended to function as a defined, reproducible microbial consortium that recapitulates the microbiome profile of ICI "super-responders," effectively mimicking the mechanism observed in fecal microbiota transplant studies without the manufacturing, safety, and scalability limitations associated with crude transplant approaches. The company said KAN-001 has demonstrated safety and efficacy across multiple mouse models and tumor types, and that a related FMT trial using donor material from the same source as KAN-001's constituent strains showed high engraftment rates and restored anti-PD-1 response without ICI-induced colitis.

A second oncology candidate, KAN-004, targets ICI-induced colitis and is intended to allow patients to remain on checkpoint therapy for longer periods. The company said preparations for patient recruitment are underway for a Phase I trial of KAN-004. Beyond oncology, Kanvas is also developing a fully synthetic microbiome replacement product for maternal environmental enteric dysfunction, a program supported in part by the Gates Foundation investment.

The pipeline rests on a spatial biology platform that the company said was initially developed at Cornell University and exclusively licensed to Kanvas. The platform, built on a high-phylogenetic-resolution fluorescence in situ hybridization approach, enables species-level identification of microbes by resolving ribosomal RNA at single-nucleotide resolution, and maps microbial communities spatially within samples — preserving the positional and functional context that conventional sequencing methods destroy. The company said the platform can detect species present at relative abundances below 0.01% and can simultaneously profile host gene expression alongside microbial mapping. Kanvas has also developed the Kanvas Spectral Lightsheet, a multispectral lightsheet microscope designed to generate spatial biology data at scale to train its AI models and build what it describes as the first microbiome atlas. The company acquired two LBP therapeutic programs, a microbial library, and associated intellectual property from Federation Bio in October 2023, a transaction that formed the basis of its current oncology pipeline and brought Federation Bio's former chief science officer into the company as chief development officer.

Matthew Cheng, co-founder and CEO, trained as a physician before moving into drug development. Jason Pontin, General Partner at DCVC and chair of Kanvas' board, cited the company's data generation capabilities and AI model development as central to its strategy across cancer treatments and gastrointestinal applications. Stephen Quake, the Lee Otterson Professor of Bioengineering and Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University and former Chief Science Advisor for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, joined the company's board as part of its recent expansion.

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