Analysis
Atlas Bio, a Basel, Switzerland startup, has raised $12.5 million in total funding across a seed round led by Creandum, as it builds AI models that simulate Phase II drug trials well enough that one biotech client reportedly skipped animal testing entirely.
What Atlas Bio does
Founded in 2024, Atlas Bio runs what it calls virtual or in silico drug trials, predicting how an individual patient's molecular biology will respond to a drug without requiring prior efficacy data on that specific drug, according to Tech Funding News. Its model is trained on roughly 2 million human RNA readouts. Co-founder and CEO Simon Romanski previously worked on autonomous vehicles starting in 2014 and studied at KIT, EPFL and Stanford; co-founder and CTO Sebastian Bayer worked on autonomous-vehicle perception models and led language-model research at Google for Search, YouTube and Google Play, per tech.eu. The company is incorporated in Delaware with a Swiss subsidiary in Basel. Atlas Bio already works with a top-10 pharmaceutical company and is in talks with several others; one Basel-based biotech client reportedly skipped animal studies for a program and moved directly to human trials using Atlas Bio's simulations, with an example asthma simulation covering 78 patients.
Atlas Bio funding history
Atlas Bio has raised two rounds to date, neither with a disclosed valuation.
“Its model is trained on roughly 2 million human RNA readouts.”
- Pre-seed -- $2.5 million, led by First Momentum Ventures and LEA Partners.
- Seed -- $10 million, led by Creandum, bringing total funding to $12.5 million.
CEO Romanski frames the ambition bluntly: "Atlas Bio is the end of Phase II as we know it, and the end of animal testing as the price of progress."
Who invested in Atlas Bio
Creandum led the $10 million seed round. First Momentum Ventures and LEA Partners co-led the earlier $2.5 million pre-seed. Creandum partner Katharina Wilhelm said the firm backed Atlas Bio because "they are paving the way for a future where predictive models can replace steps of the clinical trial process entirely."
In silico drug trial market and competitors
The in silico clinical trials market is growing fast, according to Mordor Intelligence figures cited by Tech Funding News.
- Market size -- $4.16 billion in 2026, growing to $5.93 billion by 2031.
- Unlearn -- raised a $50 million Series C led by Altimeter Capital, over $130 million raised in total.
- QuantHealth -- raised $45 million in a 2026 Series B led by Qumra Capital, says it has simulated over 600 trials with up to 90% predictive accuracy.
Both competitors are ahead of Atlas Bio on disclosed trial volume, part of the broader AI-in-biotech funding wave we track in our funding tracker.
What to watch next
Atlas Bio's first trial results are expected roughly six weeks after its funding announcement -- the real test of whether its RNA-trained predictions hold up against actual Phase II outcomes rather than retrospective modeling. The risk is that Atlas Bio is earlier and smaller than both Unlearn and QuantHealth on disclosed validation, so its path to catching up depends on whether its top-10 pharma relationship converts into a public case study before competitors lock up the next wave of enterprise pharma deals.