Another biotech company emerged from stealth in Philly, already securing more than $1 million.
Persevere Therapeutics announced a $1.5 million raise earlier this month for its cancer treatment.
Established life sciences company BioCurie also secured funding, a $9.3 million award from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).
Outside of the life sciences sphere, HR tech standout Phenom acquired yet another company, its second so far this year.
Read all the details and more money moves below.
Oncology startup Persevere raises $1.5M
Chesterbrook-based Persevere Therapeutics is preparing for its next clinical trial of a drug designed to treat ovarian and pancreatic cancers.
The startup launched in early March and raised $1.5 million after spinning out from Geistlich Pharma AG. This new funding, which is part of an ongoing seed round, will support testing its drug in ovarian cancer patients.
Founder and CEO Greg Bosch and his team developed this drug while working at global medical device company Geistlich, he told Technical.ly. However, the parent company decided that it wasn’t a priority and let Bosch purchase the assets around the drug’s development — including patents, inventory and regulatory approvals — to launch his own firm.
Because of this structure, the drug’s development is further along than most newly launched biotech companies, according to Bosch. Biotech companies typically raise seed rounds during the discovery or pre-clinical stages, whereas Persevere is already in the clinical stage.
Persevere has progressed through manufacturing, two investigational new drug applications with the FDA and a phase one clinical trial.
“We saw great safety, great tolerability … we had some really interesting signals of efficacy, which [were] encouraging us enough to form the company, Persevere, and launch it,” he said.
Longer term, Bosch hopes to raise a Series A round to support phase two clinical trials in both ovarian and pancreatic cancers and expand into treating even more types of cancer as well, he said.
“We want to make sure we raise either enough capital to advance it into multiple cancers,” Bosch said, “or partner this with a company that can advance into multiple cancers.”
BioCurie lands $9.3M from feds for cell and gene therapy
BioCurie, a Wilmington-based startup building AI software for cell and gene therapy manufacturing, won a $9.3 million award from ARPA-H.
This funding will support the company as it builds a digital tool that can mimic how new cell and gene therapies are created and tested, Irene Rombel, CEO of BioCurie, told Technical.ly. It aims to test different therapies in a more cost-efficient way.
“We already have a lot of momentum,” she said. “It’s not as if we’re starting from scratch, but this is really going to allow us to accelerate about three- to 10-fold faster than we would have without the ARPA-H funding.”
BioCurie’s technology hasn’t qualified for funding from other government agencies like the National Institutes of Health, Rombel said. But ARPA-H was specifically looking for digital projects for this program.
The company also raised a $2.2 million seed round earlier this year and Rombel plans to launch a Series A in 2027, she said.
Phenom acquires HR tech startup Be Applied
Phenom is once again scooping up the competition with its latest acquisition, talent evaluation platform Be Applied.
“[Be Applied’s] cognitive assessment technology strengthens our ability to validate skills early and fairly, using evidence‑based methods tested across millions of candidates and roles,” Mahe Bayireddi, CEO and cofounder of Phenom, told Technical.ly.
This is the second company Phenom acquired this year. The company bought agentic AI startup Included in January. These two most recent purchases align with the company’s plans to integrate AI into its offerings, Bayireddi said.
“They enhance our capabilities, deepen our AI and assessment expertise, and accelerate innovation in regions where we’re growing quickly,” he said. “The timing reflects the pace of transformation in the market, and our focus on making sure our customers can keep up.”
Over the last five years, Phenom has also acquired six other companies, including talent platform EDGE last February and employee data platform Tydy in summer 2024.
Before that, Phenom bought employee experience platform Tandemploy in 2022. Over six months in 2020 and 2021, the company purchased AI scheduling platform My Ally, recruitment tool Endouble and video tech company Talentcube.
In 2021, Phenom raised a $100 million Series D fundraising round at a $1.4 billion valuation, Forbes reported at the time.
More money moves:
- EveryCure, a nonprofit developing a drug-repurposing platform, secured $76 million from ARPA-H.
- Biotech startup Alveus Therapeutics raised an additional $37 million for its Series A. The weight-loss drug company originally raised $160 million when it emerged from stealth in January.
- The World Affairs Council of Philadelphia received a $15,000 grant from America250PA’s Lecture250 program. The org will use the funding to host a lecture about the Greater Philadelphia region’s role as an economic hub.
- Pew Charitable Trusts awarded Local Initiatives Support Corp $3.3 million to provide technical support to community programs and gave $2.8 million to Sharing Excess to improve its technology infrastructure.
- Tech education org Launchpad received a $250,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry to continue its work training high schoolers in software development. The department also granted workforce development org Per Scholas $200,000 to train students in IT careers.
- GreenLight Fund Philadelphia contributed $600,000 to tech company Basta to expand its career navigation platform to Philadelphia.
- College admission platform Open Education Technologies raised $1.4 million, according to an SEC filing.
