Based in Lausanne, Switzerland, the Debiopharm Innovation Fund is the strategic investment arm of the Swiss biopharmaceutical company Debiopharm. With $150 million under management, they recently announced a new seed funding initiative. This initiative aims to support up to 15 seed-stage startups annually. Since its inception in 2006, the fund has invested in 25 companies, focusing on Digital Health since 2017. Now, by adding seed funding activity, the fund aims to invest in companies at even earlier stages. Their ambition is to transform pharmaceutical R&D and propel digital innovation in cancer care.
Debiopharm Innovation Fund is eager to support young Seed startups by providing not only capital but also the wealth of knowledge garnered from years of investing at the nexus of technology, pharma R&D transformation, and patient-centric healthcare. These times are ripe with inspiration for innovative ideas, especially as new disruptive AI models extract profound insights from intricate data and markedly hasten the translation of research findings into future care standards.
The fund has already embarked on this mission with two Seed investments and anticipates announcing two more shortly. The initial Seed investments feature Tune Insight, a Swiss-based startup that presents a privacy-preserving data collaboration platform. This platform facilitates the training of AI models via secure federated learning. The second is Neuroute, a UK-based venture that pioneers a no-code AI clinical development platform, optimizing crucial clinical trial processes like study design and site selection.
Yet, for emerging startups, challenges are manifold: market headwinds limit access to capital, intricate regulatory landscapes prove difficult to traverse, and often, these startups find they don’t always “speak the same language” as the large pharma corporations they aim to collaborate with. This is precisely where our strategic funding and expert guidance can serve as a catalyst, propelling startups towards growth and positioning Debiopharm at the vanguard of global innovation. Furthermore, Debiopharm intends to back the most promising startups during their subsequent Series A financing rounds, which will continue to be the fund’s cornerstone activity.
Livia Lifes, co-founder and CEO at Neuroute said: “We are on track to make monumental progress in developing AI for clinical trials, which will enable transformative medicines to be brought to patients more effectively and efficiently.”
Juan Ramón Troncoso-Pastoriza, co-founder and CEO at Tune Insight mentioned: “Our latest seed round joined by Debiopharm will help us further develop our healthcare vertical, where we see a strong need for collaborations across data sets which today often stay in silos,” and continued by saying: “The potential of predictive AI models for precision medicine is tremendous, and our solution can help train these data-hungry models without ever compromising on data privacy and security.”
Marc Cikes, Managing Director of Debiopharm Innovation Fund stated: “Precision medicine begins with precision R&D, steering towards biomarker-guided development. We see a future with patient-focused trials and AI-driven care for early diagnosis and personalized treatment.”
