Avant View

AVANT VIEW Quarterly Report Q3 2026

Q3 M&A totaled roughly $3.1B across 19 deals. That’s down sharply from Q2’s $9.8B, while deal count held close to the steady ~20 a quarter seen since late 2025. What stands out is what buyers paid for. The biggest deals were for consumables, capacity and data services that drug development depends on. Repligen agreed to pay close to $1.5B for BioLife Solutions and its biopreservation media. Tempus agreed to pay about $1.5B for Personalis and its tumor-informed sequencing. Samsung Biologics made a roughly $1.8B offer for peptide CDMO PolyPeptide. On the public side, the IPO window stayed narrow, though Iambic’s September Nasdaq filing suggests AI-native discovery platforms still see a path to going public.

Venture funding came in at $2.3B across 64 deals in Q3. That’s down from Q2’s $4.1B across 132, but well above the $1.5B raised a year earlier. The bigger story is the deal count, which fell by more than half. Capital kept concentrating into fewer, larger checks: the average deal size rose to roughly $36M, and investors are backing a smaller set of platforms with more conviction rather than spreading money across the early-stage long tail.

Later-stage rounds made up about $2.1B, roughly 95% of Q3 venture dollars. Seed ($59M) and early-stage ($56M) funding fell to their lowest levels of the past five quarters. Later-stage money has now topped $1.8B for three straight quarters, while early-stage funding has fallen from $1.1B in Q4 2025. Investors are favoring de-risked platforms with clinical or commercial traction over new company formation. That fits the quarter’s broader theme: the bar is moving from “works in the clinic” to “works at commercial scale.”

AVANT VIEW

The enabling layer segment was highly active in Q3. Strategics paid up for the picks and shovels of modern drug development: Repligen for BioLife’s biopreservation media, Samsung Biologics for PolyPeptide’s peptide manufacturing capacity, and Tempus for Personalis’ tumor-informed sequencing. At the same time, some of the most closely watched manufacturing platforms faced their first real commercial test, and not all of them passed.

A number of threads stood out this quarter:

First, consolidation moved down the supply chain. The largest deals of the quarter weren’t for drugs; they were for the consumables, capacity, and data services that every drug developer depends on, noted by Repligen/BioLife and Samsung/Polypeptide. Tempus’ $1.5B acquisition of Personalis is a case for the enabling technology layer: as personalized cancer vaccines move closer to market, the race for enabling technologies is on, and the sequencing that makes each vaccine possible is the asset being bought.

Second, cell therapy manufacturing hit its commercial stress test. BMS ended its agreement with Cellares resulting in an almost immediate downsizing only weeks after Cellares said its automated-manufacturing wins had opened the floodgates with biotech customers, and Novartis and BMS both paused autoimmune CAR-T trials after serious inflammatory events, with analysts questioning whether rapid-manufacturing processes play a role. The bar for manufacturing platforms is shifting from “works in the clinic” to “works for an approved product at commercial scale.”

Third, the lab is becoming the moat. Building on last quarter’s “special data” theme, Leerink sized the “lab-in-the-loop” opportunity at roughly $7B in life-science tools spend, where AI proposes designs, automated labs test them, and the data trains the next round. Adaptyv’s raise, Bruker’s self-driving lab push (headline below), and our portfolio company Intrepid Labs’ autonomous formulation work all point the same way: the value is accruing to whoever owns the experimental loop, not just the model.

Fourth, the policy and capital-markets backdrop got noisier. China’s new five-year plan targets 25% of the world’s first-in-class drugs and roughly $522B in biotech output by 2030; U.S. vaccine policy became less predictable.

TOP STORIES

Repligen Buys the Cold Chain of Cell Therapy in a $1.5B BioLife Deal

BioLife’s CryoStor media keeps cell therapies viable through frozen storage and transport, and it is used in 18 approved therapies, including Carvykti, Yescarta, and Breyanzi. Repligen is paying roughly 11x expected 2027 revenue for it. Once a consumable is written into an approved product’s manufacturing process, it is very hard to replace, which makes it a durable asset whichever manufacturing platform wins. Repligen betting in the same quarter cell therapy manufacturing stumbled says a lot about where strategics see the safe exposure in advanced therapies.

Samsung Biologics Moves into Peptides with a $1.8B Offer for PolyPeptide

Samsung Biologics’ all-cash offer for Swiss CDMO PolyPeptide, reported as the largest deal ever by a Korean biopharma company, buys specialized peptide manufacturing capacity, including for GLP-1 drugs, across sites in Europe, India, and California. It follows CordenPharma’s acquisition of Ambiopharm last quarter. For investors, the signal is that large CDMOs are buying their way into modality-specific capacity rather than building it, and peptides are where demand is outrunning supply. The offer runs through mid-October, with closing expected by the end of 2026.

Cell Therapy Automation Meets Its First Commercial Test as BMS Exits Its Cellares Deal

BMS ended its agreement with Cellares, worth up to $380M, saying the Cell Shuttle could not meet the requirements to manufacture commercial Breyanzi. Cellares disputes that and says the platform has delivered GMP product on time and to spec in a regulated clinical program, but it has cut more than 100 roles in response. Whatever the outcome, the lesson for enabling-tech investors is clear: making an already-approved product on a new platform is a far higher bar than supporting clinical batches, and a single anchor customer can define a manufacturing company’s trajectory.

INDUSTRY NEWS

AI, TechBio & Discovery Platforms

Adaptyv Raises $40M to Scale Automated Wet Labs for Agentic Biology

Bruker Invests in Atinary, Deepening Its Push into Self-Driving Labs

Boehringer Bets up to $1B on Envisagenics’ AI Splicing Platform to Find Tumor-Specific Targets

Moderna–Merck Breakthrough Signals New Era for Personalized Cancer Vaccines

AbbVie Taps Iambic’s AI Discovery Platform Days Before Iambic Files for a Nasdaq IPO

Intrepid Labs’ Andromeda 2 Agent Nearly Triples the Hit Rate for High-Performing Drug Formulations in an Autonomous Lab

PathPresenter and Primaa Build AI into the Pathology Viewer, Cutting Dermatopathology Analysis Time by 20%

Manufacturing, CDMO & Infrastructure

Andelyn’s Curator Platform Reaches Commercial Scale with FDA Approval of Ultragenyx’s Fayuvi Gene Therapy

Made Scientific Buys Resilience’s 85,000 sq ft Cell Therapy Plant in Pennsylvania

Kincell Bio and Cellipont Merge to Form Kincellis, a Three-Site Cell Therapy CDMO

Lonza to Build a Commercial Spray-Drying Facility in Bend, Oregon

Astellas Doubles Aseptic Fill Capacity at Its Tralee, Ireland Site

Tetra Pak Launches an Industrial Bioreactor That Scales from 10 to 5,000 L for Precision Fermentation

NueCell Bio Launches to Bridge Cell Therapy Discovery and GMP Manufacturing

Nomic Bio Brings Proteomics to Human Performance

M&A & Strategic Transactions

Bruker Takes a Majority Stake in MIMETAS, Adding Organ-on-Chip Models to Its Drug Discovery Toolkit

Argonaut Carves Out Its Life Sciences & Diagnostics Division as Aluris Sciences, Backed by 1315 Capital

Primrose Bio Raises Growth Capital Led by Signet to Scale Microbial Expression and mRNA Manufacturing Enzymes

Pluristyx Closes the First Tranche of Its Series A with a Fortune 500 Strategic to Scale Engineered iPSC Lines

Eleva Spins Out Its Moss-Based Protein Production Platform as a Standalone Partnering Business

Vertex’s $10B Crinetics Buy Bets on Once-Daily Pills Replacing Injectables

Leadership & Markets

Danaher Names Diagnostics Chief Julie Sawyer Montgomery CEO as Bioprocessing Revenue Lags Orders

Repligen Chair Martin Madaus Steps In as Interim CEO of Azenta

BICO Names Commercial Chief Anders Fogelberg CEO in a Shift Toward Profitable Growth

Regulatory & Policy

FDA Approves Revolution Medicines’ First-in-Class RAS Inhibitor for Pancreatic Cancer 6.5 Months Ahead of ScheduleWhite House Orders the MMR Vaccine Split into Three Shots, a Change Manufacturers Would Need New Trials to Meett