Atlas Bio, a Basel company that uses AI to simulate clinical trials, has raised a $10m seed round led by Creandum. The company came out of stealth on 27 October 2026.
It also disclosed an earlier $2.5m pre-seed round led by First Momentum Ventures and LEA Partners, bringing its total funding to $12.5m. Creandum partner Katharina Wilhelm has joined the board. The company did not disclose a valuation.
“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, Founder and CEO, Atlas Bio
What Atlas Bio does
Phase II trials test whether a drug works in patients. Wilhelm said clinical trials take years, cost hundreds of millions and still fail 70% of the time.
Atlas Bio has built a foundation model trained on about 2 million human tissue RNA readouts. It uses the model to predict how each patient in a virtual group would respond to a drug at the molecular level, without needing earlier data on the drug's effect. The company says this could let drugmakers screen candidates before expensive trials and rely less on animal studies.
Atlas Bio says it is working with a top-10 global pharma company and is in talks with others. It says one Basel biotech client moved to human trials without animal testing for one workflow after using its simulations. Tech Funding News reported that the company ran a simulated asthma trial modelling gene expression in 78 patients.
European Biotechnology Magazine noted that the wider claim that simulations can replace clinical trials has yet to be shown.
The team
Atlas Bio was founded in 2024 by chief executive Simon Romanski and chief technology officer Sebastian Bayer, who previously led large language model research at Google. Dominik Hartl, a former doctoral fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institute, leads scientific strategy. The company is a Delaware corporation with a Swiss subsidiary.
Bayer said that to predict unknown drug effects, the company needs to learn biology in an unbiased way.
Romanski studied at KIT, EPFL and Stanford, according to the company's announcement. Hartl said drug developers are under great pressure to reduce risk earlier without slowing their programmes down. Sebastian Böhmer, founding partner at First Momentum, said Atlas Bio is building the foundational AI to change how trials are run.
What the money is for
Atlas Bio will use the money to grow its scientific and commercial teams, validate its platform further and sign more enterprise customers through 2026.
Tech Funding News named Unlearn and QuantHealth as competitors in AI-driven clinical trial design.
Wilhelm said what drew Creandum to the company is its ability to simulate trials without needing sensitive treatment data. She described clinical development as the second wave for AI in drug development. Tech Funding News reported that Atlas Bio expects its first trial results about six weeks after the announcement.
Atlas Bio did not disclose its headcount or name its pharma partner.
Company website: atlas.bio