Announcing Character Bio’s $93M Series B to Transform Eye Care with Precision Medicine
I’m incredibly proud to announce that Character Bio has raised a $93 million Series B funding round co-led by new investors aMoon and Luma Group, with additional participation from Bausch + Lomb and Jefferson Life Sciences, alongside existing investors Innovation Endeavors, Catalio Capital Management, S32, and KdT Ventures.
Today marks a major milestone that accelerates our mission: to transform eye care and tackle complex diseases through precision medicine.
Character Bio was founded with a singular vision, to unlock the patterns of progressive polygenic diseases by combining human genetics, clinical data, and AI-driven drug discovery. Our work is grounded in a simple yet powerful idea — if we can understand what drives disease progression at the genetic and clinical level, we can create better, more targeted treatments for patients with progressive eye diseases.
We’re starting with indications where the burden is high and the innovation gap is wide. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD), for example, affects 1 in 8 people over the age of 50 and is one of the leading causes of blindness globally.
My Journey to Now
I grew up in a family of doctors, where a career devoted to healthcare was a calling. Though I once considered becoming a physician, I was drawn to a bigger question: how might we scale impact in life sciences to benefit entire populations, globally?
That question led me to consulting and eventually to Pfizer, where I oversaw strategy and innovation for one of its most dynamic and entrepreneurial markets in Greater China. Pfizer medicines have played a transformative role in improving healthcare, but I also saw firsthand the industry’s growing risk aversion to investing in the most difficult and devastating diseases. That became a turning point for me.
I envisioned a company that would:
- Combine genomic data with rich clinical phenotyping
- Build its own patient-centered dataset
- Use that data not just for discovery, but for smarter trial design and better outcomes
- And do all of this to develop treatments for chronic, progressive diseases with a higher rate of success
How We’re Building Differently
We didn’t in-license a drug. We didn’t rely solely on publicly available datasets. We ran capital-efficient observational studies to build our own fit-for-purpose patient datasets, and identified and validated our own targets. From those insights, we designed drugs aimed at slowing the rate of disease progression, not just treating symptoms.
Our work is focused on:
- Dry Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD), with one lead program aimed at slowing geographic atrophy (GA) lesion growth and another co-lead program focused on preventing the appearance of GA altogether
- Primary Open-Angle Glaucoma (POAG), another progressive, high-burden eye disease with limited therapeutic options
We’re working closely with patients who’ve been part of our research journey for years, many participating not just for themselves, but for their families. These are heritable conditions, and the sense of shared purpose is powerful.
This $93M Series B enables us to advance our lead programs for dry AMD through Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials, expand our platform and pipeline to other ocular indications, and continue to redefine how patient data and genetics drive every step of drug development.
Thank you to our team, partners, patients, and investors, for being on this journey with us.
The next chapter of Character Bio begins now — and we’re excited to share our new website: www.characterbio.com, where you can learn more about our science, our mission, and what’s ahead.
