Vivodyne Announces $38 Million Seed Funding
Vivodyne, a biotech company creating better drugs by testing them on lab-grown human organs, finished securing $38 million in seed funding. Khosla Ventures led the round with participation from Kairos Ventures, CS Ventures, MBX Capital, and Bison Ventures.
Vivodyne, founded by University of Pennsylvania bioengineers Andrei Georgescu and Dan Huh, speeds up medicine development by testing on thousands of lab-grown human organ tissues using robots. Their approach generates vast and realistic datasets, powering an AI prediction platform. Furthermore, they’ve utilized this platform to enhance various drug types, from small molecules to mRNA-loaded lipid nanoparticles and cell therapies. Collaborating with most top 10 pharma companies, their work, leading to Vivodyne’s establishment, has been widely published in prestigious scientific journals like Science and Nature Medicine.
Andrei Georgescu, CEO and Co-Founder of Vivodyne said in a statement:
“We’re thrilled to have Khosla Ventures lead this funding round, which accelerates the development of our AI platform that enables the generation of predictive human data before therapeutics enter clinical trials. By combining the principles of organoids and organs-on-chips, we’ve created a new class of lifelike, lab-grown human organs. We use these lab-grown human test subjects to discover and develop new therapies for human diseases. The result is huge amounts of complex human data—larger than you could get from any clinical trial—and we train multimodal models on this data to predict and improve the safety and efficacy of new drugs. This breakthrough not only enhances the predictive accuracy of AI in drug development, but also promises to significantly improve the success rates of AI-generated drugs, setting a new standard in the field.”
The money raised will help Vivodyne improve its discovery process and AI system. This system finds new treatment targets and forecasts how patients will respond to new medications by testing them on lab-grown human organ tissues. Vivodyne has created more than 20 types of these tissues, mimicking real human functions. This helps accurately understand how new treatments work and predict patient results at different levels—cellular, tissue, organ, and overall body impact.
Susan Billings, Chief Commercial Officer, Vivodyne, commented:
“The next frontier of therapeutics development rests on achieving greater preclinical certainty before drugs enter clinical trials. Biopharma companies face a pivotal challenge when years of research and significant financial investment confront the unpredictability of clinical trial outcomes and it doesn’t have to be a nailbiter in the eleventh hour waiting for those results. This is biotech’s biggest challenge and our critical focus. Our platform enables the collection of invaluable human data from early discovery to post-approval — faster, at larger scale, with far more human predictability than animal studies. By producing human data from the outset, we’re identifying and validating novel targets, and significantly mitigating risk prior to clinical trials. For approved therapies, we’re expanding their impact through the discovery of new indications and enhancing patient care.”
Drug development often faces a hurdle: getting realistic, scalable, and repeatable human-based data. Vivodyne’s unique method in drug discovery provides human-like results at a patient level before clinical trials even begin. Their platform can handle over 10,000 individual human tissues simultaneously with robot assistance, creating extensive human-based data. Their platform is crucial in AI-driven drug discovery, solving a major hurdle: the lack of extensive, high-quality human datasets for AI training. Furthermore, it helps move away from relying solely on basic cell cultures to fill this gap.
Source: VIvodyne
