Swiss Startup Atlas Bio Secures $12.5M
to Tackle Drug Development’s
70% Failure Rate

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Swiss tech-bio firm Atlas Bio has launched from stealth with a $10 million Seed round led by Creandum, alongside a previously unannounced $2.5 million pre-Seed round led by First Momentum Ventures and LEA Partners, bringing total funding to $12.5 million. The startup is developing an AI foundation model trained on roughly 2 million RNA readouts from human tissue to run in silico clinical trials, simulating patient-level efficacy and safety signals before Phase II. The platform aims to replace both expensive Phase II trials and the preclinical animal studies that precede them.

Key Highlights

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• Phase II trials cost drug companies more than $100 million and take two to three years, yet around 70 percent of drugs fail at this stage; among drugs that are eventually approved, around 60 percent turn out to treat a different condition more effectively than existing treatments.
• Atlas Bio’s platform compresses clinical testing into a 12-week simulation project, and because the trial is virtual, multiple treatments can be tested on the same patient profile at the same disease state, enabling counterfactual analysis at scale.
• A Basel-based biotech client has eliminated animal testing from a specific drug development workflow, proceeding directly to human trials on the basis of Atlas Bio’s simulation output, in one of the first commercial uses of AI-driven simulation as a direct substitute for preclinical animal studies.
• The company cites the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, passed in 2022, which removed the legal requirement for animal testing before human trials for the first time in decades, as part of the regulatory shift away from animal models.
• Atlas Bio is already working with a top 10 global pharma company and is in talks with several other global pharma firms.
• The company was founded in 2024 by Simon Romanski (ex-KIT, EPFL, Stanford) and Sebastian Bayer, who led large language model research at Google; Dominik Hartl of the Friedrich Miescher Institute leads scientific strategy.
• The funding will be used to scale scientific and commercial teams, deepen platform validation, and onboard further enterprise clients through 2026.

Statements

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Both are now becoming outdated. Human biology is finally legible to AI - and that changes the economics of this entire industry. Many failed Phase II trials is a treatment that didn’t reach a patient who needed it, and the cost of that failure has become impossible to defend when the technology to fix it exists. Atlas Bio is the end of Phase II as we know it, and the end of animal testing as the price of progress.

• Simon Romanski, CEO and co-founder, Atlas Bio

By training our foundation model on roughly 2 million human RNA readouts, we can generalise across indications and treatments, enabling simulations that aren’t tied to one disease or one mechanism.

• Sebastian Bayer, CTO and co-founder, Atlas Bio

The first wave of AI in drug development focused on drug design and is well underway. Now, we are entering the second wave: clinical development. What excites us about Atlas is their ability to simulate trials without requiring sensitive treatment data. They are paving the way for a future where predictive models can replace steps of the clinical trial process entirely, allowing their customers to drive down both time and costs substantially.

• Katharina Wilhelm, Partner, Creandum

About the Organizations

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Atlas Bio is a Swiss tech-bio startup developing an AI foundation model for in silico clinical trials, founded in 2024 and based in Switzerland.
Creandum is a European venture capital firm investing in early-stage technology companies across the continent.

Learn More

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Article: Swiss Startup Atlas Bio Secures $12.5M to Tackle Drug Development’s 70% Failure Rate and Move Beyond Animal Testing
Physicians Committee: FDA Modernization Act 2.0