German mRNA startup SRTD completes €31.5 million seed round

SRTD Biotech, a Jülich, Germany-based mRNA therapeutics startup, has closed an oversubscribed €31.5 million seed round led by Mérieux Equity Partners through its Mérieux Innovation 2 fund, with NRW.BANK and Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund co-leading and Lilly Ventures, HTGF and Anobis Asset participating. The company, founded in 2019 by Bernd Hoffmann and Heribert Bohlen, uses intracellular RNA disease markers to trigger mRNA expression so therapeutic payloads are produced only in diseased cells, a approach it calls seRNA, built on a three-part platform combining the seRNA technology, a fusogenic lipid nanoparticle delivery system targeting organs including the liver, lungs and brain, and an AI- and bioinformatics-driven synthetic biology platform for RNA design. Alongside the financing, SRTD appointed Matthias Alder as CEO, Heinz Koeppl, founder of the synthetic biology platform and a TU Darmstadt professor, as CTO, and Jens Hennecke as CBO to lead external R&D partnerships. Alder said the proceeds will advance Hoffmann's vision of delivering safer, differentiated RNA therapies to patients with limited treatment options. NRW.BANK invested via its NRW.Venture EU Tech&Scale fund, which can deploy up to €200 million more into growth-stage companies under an InvestEU guarantee. The round signals continued investor appetite for next-generation RNA delivery and cell-selective expression platforms beyond conventional mRNA vaccines, with watch items including the first clinical validation of the seRNA approach and the build-out of the management team.