Funding profile · Gene therapy manufacturing

Perception Biosystems

A Y Combinator S18 company with one recorded financing event, no Regulation D filing, no federal grant, and an out of business marker dated February 8, 2022. This is the whole capital record.

Data as of September 24, 2026. Company-reported figures are labeled.

Rounds at a glance

What the filings show

Reading the filings

1. The accelerator check is the entire recorded balance sheet.PitchBook logs four events for this company and the raised to date figure never moves off $120,000. That is the standard Y Combinator investment of the period, dated to the S18 demo day window of August 22, 2018. Nothing in the record shows a priced round after it.
2. $120,000 does not buy one clinical batch, let alone a robotic factory.Roland Berger estimates a 500 litre AAV batch at USD3 to 7 million. The company’s recorded capital is about 4 percent of the low end of a single batch. The gap between the stated plan, an automated cGMP facility in the Bay Area, and the capital on record is the central fact of this page.
3. No Form D does not prove no money moved.EDGAR full text search returns zero documents for every name variant tried. A company that raises under Section 4(a)(2) rather than Regulation D files nothing, so an unannounced note or safe round would leave this record looking exactly as it does. What can be said is that no Regulation D offering was ever noticed to the SEC.
4. The secondary trade sits 69 days before the end.PitchBook dates a private secondary transaction to December 1, 2021 and the out of business marker to February 8, 2022. Counting forward from December 1 gives 30 days left in December, 31 in January and 8 in February: 69 days. A secondary that close to a shutdown is usually someone exiting, not someone entering.
5. The name now carries a second company’s record.Crunchbase serves the Perception Biosystems profile from an address ending in reformer-therapeutics. PitchBook’s description under Perception Biosystems is a cancer therapeutics one. RocketReach’s Perception Biosystems page opens with a sentence about Reformer Therapeutics, an immuno-oncology company. Dealroom lists Reformer Therapeutics at Palo Alto with no known external funding. Two businesses now share one set of database records, so any funding figure pulled from these sources for either name should be treated as unverified.
6. The timing runs ahead of the sector, not behind it.The out of business date is February 2022, before the deepest part of the contraction. Gene therapy and gene editing developers raised $8.2 billion across 122 deals in 2021, $3.5 billion across 60 deals in 2023, and under $1.4 billion across 39 rounds in 2024, per DealForma data reported by Reuters. Perception ran out before the money did.

Commercial signals

What to watch

• Any Form D filed under Reformer Therapeutics, the name now attached to the Perception Biosystems database entries. None exists today.
• Whether the data providers separate the two companies. Until they do, any raised total quoted for either name is unreliable.
• A new entity from Omid Karkouti or Leszek Lisowski carrying the same automated manufacturing thesis.
• Whether automated small batch AAV production attracts venture capital again after three years of falling gene therapy funding.

The Perception Biosystems story on Healthcare DiscoveryHealthcare Discovery

Related companies

• Future Fields: Shared investor: Company-Stated Partners. An Edmonton company that replaced the steel bioreactor with a genetically engineered fruit fly
• Abalone Bio: Shared investor: Company-Stated Partners. An East Bay biotech that screens antibodies for what they do to a receptor, not how tightly they stick to it
• CB Therapeutics: Shared investor: Company-Stated Partners. A Carlsbad company that brews cannabinoids, psilocybin and other plant and fungal molecules in engineered yeast
• TAXA Biotechnologies: Shared investor: Company-Stated Partners. The company behind the first synthetic biology crowdfunding campaign

Sources

1. Public recordSEC EDGAR full text search for Perception Biosystems, Perception Bio, Inc, Reformer Therapeutics and Omid Karkouti, zero documentsSEC · Sep 24, 2026
2. Public recordPublic record sweep: FDA 510(k) and PMA, ClinicalTrials.gov, NIH RePORTER, NSF awards, PubMed and SEC Form DFederal databases · Sep 24, 2026
3. Public recordCapture index for perception.bio, 2019 to 2026, including the Apr 10, 2022 redirectInternet Archive · accessed Sep 24, 2026
4. Data providerPerception Biosystems company profile: 2018 founding, out of business Feb 8, 2022, $120K raised, 2 employeesPitchBook · accessed Sep 24, 2026
5. Data providerPerception Biosystems company informationRocketReach · accessed Sep 24, 2026
6. Data providerReformer Therapeutics company information, no known external fundingDealroom · accessed Sep 24, 2026
7. Data providerPerception Biosystems company record, batch S18YCDB · accessed Sep 24, 2026
8. CompanyPerception Biosystems company page, showing S18 and InactiveY Combinator · accessed Sep 24, 2026
9. IndependentOdylia holds inaugural Gene Therapy Pre-Competitive ConsortiumOdylia Therapeutics · Mar 25, 2019
10. IndependentCutting the cost of gene therapy manufacturing, with batch cost estimatesRoland Berger · Jul 6, 2023
11. IndependentGene therapy loses luster as investors eye quicker returns from weight-loss drugsReuters, Deena Beasley · Mar 21, 2025

Compiled from SEC, FDA, NIH and NSF public records, Internet Archive captures, commercial data providers and published reports as of September 24, 2026. Form D notices report offerings under Regulation D; a company that raises under another exemption files none, so the absence of a filing is not proof that no capital was raised. Healthcare Venture Capital Fund holds no position in Perception Biosystems. This page is not an offer to sell or a recommendation to buy any security.