By Helena Strigård, CEO and Founder
November 12, 2026
Bita Sehat, Partner at Trill Impact Advisory
Trill Impact Ventures has led a USD 6 million Series A extension round in Zafrens, alongside existing investor imec.xpand. Zafrens is a San Diego-based TechBio company developing an ultra-high-throughput experimental platform that generates rich biological data to test and validate drug discovery hypotheses at scale.
1. Congratulations on the recent financing round. What does this investment mean for Trill Impact and Zafrens?
Thank you. Zafrens has already demonstrated the capabilities of its platform through multiple discovery programs, including pilot engagements with major pharma companies.
For Trill Impact, this financing is about building on that foundation. The ambition is to expand those initial engagements into broader commercial relationships, while advancing the company's proprietary therapeutic pipeline and continuing to develop the capabilities of their platform called Z-Screen.
We also see an interesting opportunity emerging beyond traditional pharma R&D, as frontier AI labs increasingly need high-quality experimental biological data to develop and validate their models.
2. This is Trill Impact's first investment in TechBio. Why did you decide to enter this segment now?
We've been following developments in AI and their potential applications in life sciences from the beginning basically for years. And having spent many years as a scientist, I'm very aware of what advances in omics technologies can make possible.
I'm old enough to remember the early microarray days, and then how revolutionary next-gen sequencing was. Suddenly, as scientists, we could generate biological data at a scale that had previously been unimaginable. But I also remember how data analysis was consistently a bottleneck. Data generation was advancing faster than the tools available to meaningfully interpret it.
So, the enormous potential of AI in biology is quite clear to me and I think the market need is equally clear. But then there's the business side of it.
My view is that AI-driven target identification and molecular prediction are becoming increasingly accessible. I suspect that over time even commoditized to some extent. That doesn't make them less scientifically valuable, but it does change where the competitive advantage lies. And as always as one bottleneck is removed, another becomes more apparent.
Advances in AI now make it possible to generate an extraordinary number of biological hypotheses computationally. But how can these hypotheses be tested? Which predictions actually hold up in complex biological systems? And how can that validation happen at a scale and speed that matches the advances in computation? I believe some of the most interesting business models emerge precisely at these bottlenecks.That's what attracted Trill Impact Ventures to Zafrens. Its platform addresses the growing need for high-quality experimental evidence, connecting molecular information with actual cellular behavior at scale.
We had been looking closely at TechBio for quite some time and had a clear view of where we believed long-term value could be created. Zafrens was a strong fit with that thesis. At the end of the day, Trill Impact invests in companies, not labels.
3. How much of your investment decision was based on the technology itself, and how much on the team assembled around Zafrens, including Paul Laikind as Chairman, Kevin Eastwood as Chief Business Officer and Joey Azofeifa as Chief Technology Officer?
The technology was what initially attracted us to Zafrens, but ultimately, Trill Impact invests in companies, not technologies in isolation.
The quality of the team is equally important. With platform companies, the challenge is not only to develop sophisticated technology, but also to identify the right commercial opportunities and translate that technology into valuable products and partnerships.Zafrens brings together expertise in biology, chemistry, microfluidics, engineering and computational sciences. That combination is not easy to assemble, and it is an important part of what makes the platform attractive.
Swamy Vijayan is a serial entrepreneur with a successful exit behind him, and he and the team have spent years developing the technology. Joey brings strong technical leadership, particularly in computational biology and the integration of experimental and analytical capabilities. With Paul joining as Chairman, the company gains extensive experience in building and scaling biotech businesses. Kevin brings a complementary perspective, particularly in business development and structuring pharma collaborations.
In our view, the company is now well positioned to build on what the team has achieved so far. The focus is on advancing its proprietary therapeutic programs, expanding commercial opportunities for the platform and continuing to strengthen its capabilities. The combination of deep scientific expertise and experienced business leadership provides a strong foundation for this next phase. We've been genuinely impressed by what the team has built and their ability to bring together so many different disciplines into one integrated platform.
4. California at large, and San Diego in particular, are life science hotspots that the Venture Bridge initiative aims to connect more closely with the Nordics. What opportunities do you see in strengthening the relationship between these ecosystems?
I think the Nordics and San Diego have complementary strengths.
The Nordics have an excellent scientific foundation, strong academic institutions and a growing life sciences ecosystem. San Diego, meanwhile, has a mature biotech environment, with experienced management teams, specialist investors, pharma companies and a deep pool of talent.
At Trill Impact, we've always looked at investment opportunities internationally. For us, geography is secondary to the quality of the science, the team and the opportunity.
But I think there's a broader point here. I've always believed that life sciences is global by definition. The science, talent, capital and expertise needed to build successful companies rarely sit within a single ecosystem. Scientific innovation can originate in one geography, while the expertise, capital or industrial partnerships needed to develop it may be found elsewhere.
That's why initiatives such as Venture Bridge are valuable. They create opportunities for researchers, entrepreneurs and investors to build relationships across ecosystems that might otherwise remain relatively disconnected. I think the real value comes when those connections translate into concrete collaborations, investments and company-building opportunities.
5. Venture Bridge during Nobel Week focuses on brain health, women's health and antimicrobial resistance. How could Zafrens' platform contribute to advances in these areas?
Potentially all three. In our view, one of the strengths of Zafrens' platform is that it's indication-agnostic, meaning it can be applied across very different disease areas. But that flexibility also requires discipline. Just because a technology can address many indications doesn't mean a company should pursue them all. The key is to focus on areas where the platform can offer the greatest differentiation and create the most value. What I find particularly interesting about Zafrens is that it allows us to ask much more sophisticated biological questions at scale. Traditionally, in drug discovery, we often measure one thing at a time. Does a compound bind to a target? Does it activate or inhibit a particular pathway? Does it produce a certain cellular response?
But biology is rarely that simple.
With Zafrens, you can expose cells to different compounds or other interventions, follow how those cells behave over time, and then look at the changes in gene expression associated with those responses. And importantly, you can do this across very large numbers of experiments.
The platform combines microfluidics, longitudinal imaging and single-cell transcriptomics. That means you can connect what happens functionally in a cell with its underlying molecular state, rather than relying on a single endpoint. It can also accommodate experimental systems involving different cell populations, which is particularly interesting when disease biology depends on interactions between cells.
Take brain health as an example. In neurodegenerative diseases, we're not just dealing with one dysfunctional protein or pathway. There are complex interactions between neurons, immune cells and other supporting cells. The ability to study different cell populations together, observe their responses over time and connect those responses to molecular changes could help us better understand disease mechanisms and evaluate potential treatments.
For example, rather than simply asking whether a compound changes the expression of a particular gene, you could investigate whether it changes a disease-relevant cellular phenotype, which cells respond, how that response develops and which molecular pathways are associated with it.
In women's health, I think there's a particularly interesting opportunity because many conditions remain poorly understood at the molecular level. Endometriosis, for example, involves inflammatory processes, hormonal signalling and interactions between different cell types. A platform like Zafrens could potentially help investigate which biological pathways are driving those processes and how different interventions affect them.
The advantage is not simply screening more compounds. It's generating a richer understanding of how a potential treatment affects a complex biological system, which could help identify therapeutic approaches that conventional target-based screening might miss.
Antimicrobial resistance is a somewhat different application. One potential direction would be to investigate how infected host cells respond to different treatments, including combinations of compounds, and examine the molecular changes associated with those responses. Directly studying bacterial resistance mechanisms would require appropriate pathogen-specific experimental systems, so I would distinguish that from the platform's established cellular screening capabilities.
Now, I want to be careful here. These are potential applications of the technology, not necessarily programs Zafrens is pursuing today.
But the broader point is that many of our most difficult diseases involve complex, dynamic biological processes. Being able to connect molecular changes with actual cellular function, at scale, gives us a much richer way of investigating that biology and ultimately, that's what we need if we want to make better decisions earlier in drug discovery.
6. The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine recognises advances in optogenetics and longitudinal imaging. What potential do you see for Zafrens' technology in understanding and treating neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's?
Suggested adjustment to the Helena : The 2026 Nobel Prize recognizes the development of optogenetics rather than longitudinal imaging specifically. I suggest slightly adjusting the question to: "The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine recognizes the development of optogenetics, highlighting the importance of technologies that allow us to investigate cellular function with increasing precision. How could Zafrens' approach contribute to understanding complex diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's?"
I think one of the most important developments in modern biology is our growing ability to move beyond static molecular measurements and actually observe biological processes as they unfold. Optogenetics is a remarkable example of how new experimental tools can transform our understanding of cellular function, particularly in neuroscience.
Zafrens approaches the challenge from a different direction, but there is a common principle: understanding biology requires more than identifying which genes or proteins are present. We need to understand what cells actually do, how they respond to interventions and how those responses change over time. That's particularly relevant in neurodegenerative diseases.
In Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the underlying biology is complex and involves multiple cell types, pathways and mechanisms. A molecular change that looks promising in isolation doesn't necessarily translate into a meaningful functional benefit.
With a platform like Z-Screen, the opportunity is to study disease-relevant cellular models, observe how cells respond to different interventions and connect those functional responses to changes in gene expression. For example, you could investigate whether a compound improves a disease-associated cellular phenotype, whether that improvement is sustained over time and which molecular pathways are associated with the response.
The combination of longitudinal imaging and transcriptomic information could also help distinguish compounds that produce a desirable functional effect from those that simply alter a molecular marker without meaningfully improving cellular behavior.
Of course, the relevance of those findings depends on the quality of the disease models, and translating cellular observations into effective treatments remains a major challenge.
But I think this illustrates a broader shift in drug discovery. We are moving towards a much more integrated understanding of biology, where computational predictions, molecular measurements and functional experiments inform each other.
That's where I see the potential of Zafrens: not as a technology specific to neurodegeneration, but as an experimental platform that could help interrogate complex disease biology more systematically and identify better therapeutic starting points.