Orbion wins the Scientific Excellence Award at Nucleate Germany 2026

On 20 May 2026, at the Nucleate Activator semi-finals at WERK1 in Munich, an independent jury awarded Orbion the Scientific Excellence Award.

Nine teams pitched. We were one of them. For a company building ML models for protein engineering, this is the recognition that matters most to us — the one that maps directly to the science.

About Nucleate Activator

Nucleate is a global, founder-focused program supporting early-stage life-science companies through structured mentorship, expert networks, and a competitive cohort experience. The Germany cohort kicked off in February 2026.

The value of the program for us has been concrete: pressure-tested feedback on the science, the commercial story, and how we communicate both to people outside our immediate field.

The semi-finals

Nine cohort teams pitched at WERK1 in Munich on 20 May 2026, in front of an independent jury drawn from across the European life-science ecosystem. Awards were given across multiple categories; the Scientific Excellence Award is the one that recognizes the technical depth and rigor of the underlying work.

Thanks to the jury for the careful read, and to the Nucleate Germany team — organizers, mentors, and the other eight teams in the cohort — for making the program what it is.

What we pitched: decision-grade AI for membrane protein engineering

Aniruddh Goteti and Çağlar Bozkurt presented Orbion's focus: membrane proteins.

About 25% of human proteins and more than 60% of drug targets sit in the membrane, behind hundreds of billions of dollars in annual drug sales. They are also the targets where modern protein engineering most reliably breaks down — experiments fail at very high rates and campaigns run six months or longer. AlphaFold solved structure. Stability, expression, and construct design — the decisions that actually determine whether a program moves forward — are still mostly trial-and-error.

Orbion is the layer that turns a membrane protein sequence into ranked variants and experimental conditions, so scientists test fewer things and get to working constructs faster. The pitch walked the jury through that workflow end-to-end and showed independent validation of our stability predictions against wet-lab data from a CRO partner.

What's next: Innovation Forum Berlin, 12 June 2026

The semi-finals were a checkpoint, not a finish line. The next stop is the Nucleate Innovation Forum at CIC Berlin on 12 June 2026, where we'll pitch and present a poster alongside other cohort teams. The event is open — you can register at the link above.

If you'll be there — protein engineer, drug-discovery scientist, potential partner, or just curious — come find us. The poster is the version of the conversation where we can actually go deep on the data.

Bottom line

A Scientific Excellence Award isn't the kind of recognition you optimize for; it's the kind you hope falls out of doing the science properly. We're proud that, on this read, it did.

Thank you to Nucleate Germany, to the jury, and to the customers and collaborators who put real proteins through our platform and tell us — bluntly — what works and what doesn't. That feedback loop is what the award is really about.

Want to see what Orbion does on your membrane protein? Get in touch — or come say hi in Berlin on 12 June.