Dutch biotech CryoCloud raises €2M to enhance machine learning for drug discovery

Dutch biotech CryoCloud has secured a €2M Seed funding round to expand its cryo-electron microscopy SaaS platform, which aims to streamline drug development by automating complex structural biology workflows.

The round was led by Barcelona-based healthtech VC Nina Capital, with participation from Value Creation Capital, ROM Utrecht, and the Utrecht Health Seed Fund.

CryoCloud is seeking to make cryo-EM - a Nobel Prize-winning technique for determining 3D protein structures - more accessible through cloud automation. The company’s platform enables researchers to visualise and analyse protein structures at high resolution, drastically reducing the time and cost traditionally associated with this form of molecular imaging.

“With CryoCloud, we have built the first cryo-EM platform that allows scientists to access petabytes of storage and dozens of GPUs in minutes rather than months, enabling scientists to run their cryo-EM projects faster and more effortlessly,” said CryoCloud CEO and co-founder Robert Englmeier, PhD.

“It’s a turnkey solution: our customers tell us their productivity rates have increased and they have been able to expand and run their cryo-EM projects with greater efficiency and reliability. Our platform already delivers huge benefits today - and we’re excited to use this funding round to build the next generation of algorithms that will make the analysis even easier.”

The funding brings CryoCloud’s total investment to €2.8M, following a €500,000 Pre-Seed round in 2023. The company’s customer base already spans more than 25 countries and includes users in academia, biotech, and the pharmaceutical industry.

Cryo-EM is gaining traction in structural biology and drug discovery due to its ability to provide atomic-level resolution of proteins, a critical step in structure-based drug design. Traditionally, however, the technique has been limited to elite labs due to high hardware and expertise requirements.

CryoCloud’s platform aims to reduce these barriers by delivering cryo-EM analysis via scalable cloud computing infrastructure. By using proprietary machine learning algorithms, the startup enables scientists to process terabytes of structural data. Drugs developed using structure-based methods like cryo-EM have shown significantly higher success rates in early-stage trials, making the technology strategically valuable for pharmaceutical R&D.

“We are proud to continue to support this highly specialised team transforming structural biology, starting with an innovative approach to cloud resources and workflow solutions for cryo-EM data analysis,” said Marta G. Zanchi, founder and Managing Partner at Nina Capital. “We are excited to be joined in this latest round by new investors with domain expertise, all of whom recognise the timeliness of this market need and the relevance of CryoCloud's product.”