Vitroscope, a Norwegian start-up that makes lab equipment for keeping living human tissue alive and under observation for days, has raised a $5m seed round co-led by Cerberus Ventures and YZR Capital. The company announced the round on 3 November 2026 from Trondheim.
The seed round comes with $2m in non-dilutive funding from the Research Council of Norway, for a $7m package in total. Arcas Ventures, Golden Egg Check and Devico Invest also invested, together with angel investors Carles Reina, Fàtima Godall and Oskari Pétas.
Vitroscope said it has now raised $8.8m in total. It did not disclose a valuation.
“This funding lets us bring this capability to more labs and extend it to higher-throughput experiments with vitro.scale.”Carlo Kriesi, co-founder and CEO, Vitroscope
What Vitroscope makes
Its first product, vitro.alive, is a benchtop system that runs six experiments side by side. It pumps fluid through tissue samples on a set programme, controls oxygen, pH and temperature in real time and images the living cells as they respond. Tech.eu reported that the system works with standard inverted microscopes and with tissue models that labs already use.
A larger system, vitro.scale, will run 96 experiments in parallel. The company expects customers to start testing it in 2027 and plans to launch it in 2028.
Co-founder and chief executive Carlo Kriesi said living tissue cannot be reduced to a snapshot, because its behaviour depends on what is happening around it over time. The company holds several international patents, it said.
Early results
Vitroscope said that, working with Instant Bio, it kept human brain organoids with blood vessels alive under perfusion for seven days. It also reported growing organised liver tissue on the platform and measuring impaired responses to flow in kidney cells that lack a protein called AdipoR1.
Its investors pitched the company as a source of data for drug developers. Markus Feuerecker, founding and managing partner at YZR Capital, described the platform as physical AI infrastructure, where every experiment on living human tissue produces data that can be compared. Chenny Zhang, managing director at Cerberus Ventures, said much of the way biology is studied is still static.
What the money is for
Vitroscope will use the money to roll out vitro.alive commercially and to validate vitro.scale. Kriesi said the funding would let the company bring its system to more labs and extend it to experiments with higher throughput.
The company has not said when it was founded or how many people it employs, and it gave no details of earlier funding beyond the total.
Zhang said the company enables researchers to observe living tissue over time and to generate longitudinal data that will become more valuable as drug discovery relies more on AI. Feuerecker said YZR Capital saw Vitroscope as a key building block in rewiring the pharmaceutical value chain, by producing evidence relevant to humans long before the first clinical trial.
The Business Wire release was also published by the life sciences news site BioSpace, and Tech.eu covered the round the same day.
Company website: vitroscope.com