Company targets huge failure rate in clinical trials, using robotics and AI to develop and study ‘fully functional’ human tissues in the lab.
US biotech Vivodyne has secured $40 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures for its mission to eliminate the need for animal testing drug development. The company leverages robotics and AI to grow and analyze thousands of fully functional human tissues, directly addressing the biological mismatch that underpins the staggering 95% failure rate in human clinical trials following successful animal tests. The new funding, which builds on Vivodyne’s $38 million seed round, will enable the company to open a 23,000-square-foot fully robotic facility in South San Francisco.
Traditional preclinical drug development has long relied on animal models that, despite certain biological similarities to humans, routinely produce misleading results due to fundamental differences in disease manifestation and immune responses. Vivodyne’s approach replaces these inadequate models with large-scale, clinically predictive testing on complex human tissues. The company claims its platform’s ability to simulate human biology in vitro allows pharma companies to generate more accurate insights across all stages of drug development, from target discovery to safety and efficacy assessments.
Vivodyne co-founder and CEO Dr Andrei Georgescu told us how the technology holds potential in the growing longevity biotech sector.
“To date, all research into chronic diseases has been limited by the lack and scale of available human data,” he said. “We cannot effectively discover how to make humans live well beyond 100 years, by testing in mice with lifespans of one year. Now, Vivodyne is enabling large-scale research on lab-grown human organ tissues to produce massive amounts of new data and, hopefully, actionable insights from the pharmaceutical industry. The best way to understand how chronic diseases impact how humans age can only be addressed at by large-scale research based directly in human tissues.”
At the heart of Vivodyne’s innovation is its ability to produce and analyze over 10,000 independent human tissue experiments per robotic run. The tissues, which are significantly larger than traditional organoids, support high-resolution, multi-omic data collection including imaging, single-cell transcriptomics, and proteomics. These datasets reflect authentic human responses to drugs, allowing researchers to capture intricate disease states and immune dynamics that animal models simply cannot replicate.
Vivodyne says its system is capable of cultivating over 20 different human tissue types, including liver, lung, bone marrow, placenta, and lymph nodes, and can model a wide range of diseases such as cancer, fibrosis, autoimmune conditions, and infectious diseases. The company claims its platform is already being used by “most” leading pharmaceutical companies, who are leveraging it to de-risk clinical trials and improve drug candidate selection.
In addition to Khosla, the funding round included participation from new investors Lingotto Investment Management, Helena Capital, Fortius Ventures, alongside existing investors Kairos Ventures, CS Ventures, Bison Ventures, and MBX Capital.
“Robotics and AI are already starting to fundamentally change the healthcare landscape and Vivodyne is pioneering the way there,” said Vinod Khosla. “Using robotics and AI, Vivodyne can grow and test over 100,000 different whole human tissues automatically within two weeks, enabling pharma to achieve human-equivalent insights before committing billions of dollars to clinical trials.”
