TU Delft spinout lands €150K to speed up antibody testing

Startup Constellate Proteomics has closed a pre-seed funding round for its tool that accelerates antibody quality control in biopharma applications. The pre-seed round includes €150,000 in convertible financing from Tech Scout Venture Fund and Imec.istart, with Graduate Ventures and Delft Enterprises B.V. joining later.

Biopharmaceutical development faces a critical bottleneck: slow, expensive, and expert-dependent protein analysis. Traditional methods for antibody quality control require weeks of specialized work, delaying decisions and inflating costs.

Constellate Proteomics addresses this gap with RAYmAb™, a platform that delivers four distinct quality analyses—titer, glycosylation, aggregation, and charge variant—from a tiny, untreated sample of the liquid cells were grown in, in minutes. This reduces reliance on large, expensive equipment and specialized operators, making high-resolution analysis accessible to a broader range of developers.

The technology

RAYmAb™ is a system for measuring antibodies — the proteins that drug developers and manufacturers need to count and characterize precisely. It works by sticking antibodies to a glass surface using “reversible affinity probes”: molecules that grab onto an antibody, hold it still long enough to be looked at, then let go again. A single-molecule microscope, powerful enough to see individual molecules rather than just a bulk signal, then reads what’s there.

The payoff is sensitivity. RAYmAb detects antibodies at concentrations 1,000 times lower than the industry’s current standard method, so it needs far less sample to give an answer.

It is also accurate. When its measurements are compared against samples whose true antibody content is already known, the results line up closely: an R² of 0.97, meaning the measured values track the real ones almost perfectly on a scale where 1.0 is exact agreement. Its readings of antibody concentration (the “titer”) land within 8% of the true value 19 times out of 20.

Behind the technology are two core patents, developed at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and licensed by Constellate. The company is currently running pilot projects — unpaid trials with potential customers — in China, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and the United States. Its goal is to turn three to five of those pilots into paying contracts within a year, and to grow throughput from 100 samples a day to more than 1,000.

Funding and future plans

Constellate plans to use the funds to accelerate commercialization. This includes developing a compact benchtop instrument with disposable cartridges. The company also eyes a €1.9 million funding round in 2027 to further scale its operations and technology.

Delft University of Technology spun out Constellate in February 2026, led by CEO Carlos de Lannoy (PhD, single-molecule biophysics), Arian Khoshchin (MSc, corporate and commercial development), and Dennis de Beeld (MSc, analytical method development).

Expanding capacity and commercialization

Constellate is opening a second location at BioVille in Diepenbeek, Belgium, as part of the Imec.istart Summer 2026 cohort. This move supports the company’s goal to scale its technology and meet demand from global clients. The platform’s modular, cartridge-based design allows for future applications in disease diagnostics and academic research. However, its immediate focus remains on biopharma. The company’s roadmap includes adding assays for two further quality characteristics to its existing suite of analyses.