SRTD Biotech announced an oversubscribed €31.5 million seed round on 9 November 2026, according to its press release, which is datelined Jülich, Germany, and hosted by Mérieux Equity Partners. The financing was led by Mérieux Equity Partners through its Mérieux Innovation 2 fund, with NRW.BANK and Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund joining as co-leads. The release also names Lilly Ventures, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and the Freiburg-based family office Anobis Asset. The valuation was not disclosed.

The round

NRW.BANK invested through its NRW.Venture EU Tech&Scale fund; the release says an InvestEU guarantee agreement with the European Commission lets NRW.BANK invest up to €200 million across scale-ups through the fund. European Biotechnology Magazine reports that NRW.BANK contributed €7 million to the round, a figure that is not in the release. The release says the money will fund preclinical development of SRTD’s pipeline of targeted RNA therapies in oncology, autoimmune and fibrosis indications, towards an Investigational New Drug (IND) application. SRTD’s previous financing was a “seven-figure” seed round announced by HTGF in November 2024, led by HTGF with business angels; its amount was not disclosed, and no total raised has been stated.

The technology and pipeline

The release describes SRTD as an integrated RNA therapeutics company founded in 2019 and based in Jülich, with three technology platforms: seRNA (selectively expressed RNA), which uses intracellular RNA disease markers to activate mRNA expression only within target cells; a fusogenic lipid nanoparticle delivery platform meant to reach the liver, lung, brain and other organs; and a synthetic biology platform with bioinformatics and AI-driven RNA design. The company’s website lists four preclinical programmes, in hepatocellular carcinoma, lung cancer, severe liver disease and fibrosis, and autoimmune disease involving B-cell subsets. European Biotechnology says no individual drug candidates are named.

There is no clinical data. European Biotechnology notes a January 2025 study in Nature Communications on the seRNA principle in which, in a mouse model of glioblastoma, direct injection into early-stage tumours significantly reduced tumor size without detectable side effects, according to the magazine’s summary, and writes that “there is still a long way to go from a working principle in an animal model to a clinically effective and safe therapy.” Lens did not read the paper.

Leadership

Matthias Alder was appointed chief executive following the financing. Co-founder Dr. Bernd Hoffmann is now chief scientific officer; HTGF described him as CEO in 2024. The release also names Dr. Heinz Koeppl, a professor at Technische Universität Darmstadt, as chief technology officer and Dr. Jens Hennecke as chief business officer. HTGF and European Biotechnology name Dr. Heribert Bohlen as a second co-founder. Alder said in the release: “We thank all our investors for joining this exceptional syndicate in one of the largest biotech seed financings in Europe to date.” That description of the round’s size is the company’s claim and was not checked by Lens.

Sources and notes

Sources: SRTD’s release as hosted on the Mérieux Equity Partners website (9 November 2026), which Lens read in full; HTGF’s release of the same date; European Biotechnology Magazine (Georg Kääb, 10 November); Tech Funding News; the TechStartups roundup; and HTGF’s November 2024 seed release. One search lead said BioMedVC led the round; no source Lens read says so, and BioMedVC appears in the European Biotechnology article only in a paragraph about a different company’s seed round. The release and some outlets describe the therapies as mRNA, while European Biotechnology and TechStartups say RNA. Lens did not read statements from Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund or Lilly Ventures.

Image: A 96-well laboratory microplate. Photo: Gannu03, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (file record dated 2025). Stand-in image of a generic laboratory consumable; it does not show SRTD’s work.