Swiss startup Atlas Bio secures $12.5M to tackle drug development’s 70% failure rate and move beyond animal testing

Atlas Bio has come out of stealth with a $10 million Seed round led by Creandum, plus an earlier $2.5 million pre-Seed round that had not been disclosed before. The Swiss tech-bio company says the money will help it scale its scientific and commercial teams, validate the platform further, and bring in more enterprise customers through 2026.

Its pitch is unusually blunt: run clinical trials in software before a drug ever reaches a patient. Atlas Bio is building a foundation model for in silico trials, trained on roughly 2 million RNA readouts from human tissue. The goal is to simulate how a treatment behaves across a virtual cohort, then spot efficacy and safety signals before companies commit to a narrow Phase II study.

That matters because Phase II is a brutal place to spend time and money. The company says those trials can cost drugmakers more than $100 million and take two to three years, while around 70% of drugs fail there. Atlas Bio argues that the same simulation layer could also surface drugs that work better in off-label uses than in the disease they were originally tested for.

The platform is also being positioned as a way out of animal testing. Regulators are already moving in that direction, and the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 removed the legal requirement for animal testing before human trials in 2022. Atlas Bio says one Basel-based biotech has already used its output to remove animal testing from a specific workflow and move directly to human trials.

The company was founded in 2024 by Simon Romanski and Sebastian Bayer, with Dominik Hartl leading scientific strategy. Atlas Bio says it is already working with a top 10 global pharma company and talking with several others. Creandum partner Katharina Wilhelm is joining the board.