Vitroscope raises $7M to turn living human tissue into a new source of drug discovery data

Vitroscope, a biotech company developing perfusion platforms to study immune activity, treatment responses and disease mechanisms in real time, has raised $7 million, comprising a $5 million seed round and $2 million in non-dilutive funding.

Cerberus Ventures and YZR Capital co-led the seed round, with participation from Arcas Ventures, Golden Egg Check, Devico Invest and angel investors, including Carles Reina, Fàtima Godall and Oskari Pétas. The Research Council of Norway is providing the non-dilutive funding. Vitroscope has raised $8.8 million to date.

Researchers increasingly use sophisticated models, including organoids and fresh human tissue. Yet static well plates cannot replicate the flow and oxygen conditions these models need, limiting tissue viability, experimental duration and data collection. Vitroscope’s automated perfusion platform maintains controlled flow through living tissue, enabling longer experiments and more data for drug discovery.

Carlo Kriesi, Co-founder and CEO of Vitroscope, says:

“We started Vitroscope because living tissue cannot be reduced to a snapshot. Its behaviour depends on what is happening around it over time.

With vitro.alive, researchers set those conditions themselves and follow how the tissue responds for days. This funding lets us bring this capability to more labs and extend it to higher-throughput experiments with vitro.scale.”

Vitroscope and Instant Bio maintained vascularised human brain organoids under perfusion for seven days with vitro.alive. In separate work, primary human liver cells formed organised tissue on the platform but not in standard well plates. Another study using the technology found that kidney cells lacking AdipoR1, a receptor linked to diabetic kidney disease, showed impaired responses to physiological fluid flow.

Chenny Zhang, Managing Director at Cerberus Ventures, says:

“Biology isn’t static, but much of the way we study it still is. Vitroscope is changing that by enabling researchers to observe living tissue over time, generating the rich, longitudinal data that will become increasingly valuable in an AI-driven world.”

Vitroscope’s vitro.alive combines programmable perfusion, real-time control of oxygen, pH and temperature, and live-cell imaging in a benchtop platform for six independent, parallel experiments. The platform works with standard inverted microscopes and allows users to keep their existing tissue models.

Currently in development, vitro.scale will support 96 parallel experiments. Vitroscope holds multiple international patents covering its core technology and methods.

Markus Feuerecker, Founding and Managing Partner at YZR Capital, says:

“Drug discovery and development need data that allows researchers to actually predict how patients will respond, and Vitroscope generates it at the source.

Its platform is physical AI infrastructure: every experiment on living human tissue produces proprietary, comparable data that compounds over time. For us at YZR Capital, Vitroscope is a key building block in rewiring the pharma value chain, turning cell-level insight into human-relevant evidence long before the first clinical trial.

The funding will support the commercial rollout of vitro.alive, the company’s benchtop platform, and validation of vitro.scale, its higher-throughput platform. Customer testing of vitro.scale is expected to begin in 2027, ahead of its planned 2028 launch.