SAN FRANCISCO, CA & PHILADELPHIA, PA — Vivodyne has raised $40 million in Series A funding to expand its cutting-edge robotics and AI platform, which uses lab-grown human tissues to transform preclinical drug testing. The funding, led by Khosla Ventures with contributions from investors such as Lingotto Investment Management and Helena Capital, supports a new 23,000-square-foot fully robotic lab at Genesis Marina in South San Francisco.
Vivodyne tackles a critical issue in pharmaceutical development. While preclinical testing in animals often yields cures, human clinical trials fail almost 95% of the time. By shifting the focus to human tissue models, Vivodyne aims to produce more reliable results and improve success rates in clinical trials.
“Vivodyne is fundamentally changing how drugs move from the lab bench to human trials,” said Andrei Georgescu, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Vivodyne. “A model that is only predictive 5% of the time isn’t a model. We’re redefining success in drug discovery by overcoming the limitations that have stalled scientific progress for decades.”
Vivodyne’s platform grows thousands of functional human tissues daily, providing pharmaceutical companies with clinically predictive datasets that eliminate reliance on less accurate animal models. This approach enables more precise testing across all phases of drug development, including target discovery, candidate selection, and safety testing.
The shift toward human models is timely, especially amid recent commitments by the FDA and NIH to move away from animal testing. Vivodyne’s automated robotic systems generate over 10,000 human-tissue experiments in a single run, delivering data a thousand times more comprehensive than traditional organoids. These datasets encompass advanced human responses, including immune reactions, disease states, and multi-omic profiles like proteomics and single-cell transcriptomics.
“Pharma has waited decades for scalable human data before clinical trials,” Georgescu added. “We’re now generating data from tens of thousands of complex human tissues, capturing immune responses and disease states that were previously inaccessible. This unprecedented scale and resolution unlock entirely new avenues for drug development.”
Vivodyne’s technology is already trusted by major pharmaceutical companies looking to improve clinical outcomes. With its ability to integrate AI into therapeutic design, the company is actively advancing treatments ranging from small molecules to cell therapies.
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, emphasized the impact of Vivodyne’s innovation, saying, “Robotics and AI are already starting to fundamentally change the healthcare landscape, and Vivodyne is pioneering the way there. Using robotics and AI, Vivodyne can grow and test over 100,000 different whole human tissues automatically within two weeks, enabling pharma to achieve human-equivalent insights before committing billions of dollars to clinical trials.”
The new San Francisco lab marks a critical milestone in Vivodyne’s mission. By scaling operations and continuing to produce actionable human-based data, the company is poised to redefine preclinical drug testing and accelerate drug discovery worldwide.
For the latest news on everything happening in Chester County and the surrounding area, be sure to follow MyChesCo on Google News and MSN.