StartupsNov 3, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC·2 min read

Vitroscope raises $7M to keep living human tissue alive in labs

Biotech startup Vitroscope has raised $7 million to roll out perfusion platforms that keep living tissue viable for days and generate richer drug discovery data.

Benchtop perfusion platform with a microscope used to keep living human tissue alive during drug discovery experiments. — Image: Tech.eu

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Biotech company Vitroscope has raised $7 million, made up of a $5 million seed round and $2 million in non-dilutive funding, to commercialise perfusion platforms that let researchers follow living human tissue in real time. Cerberus Ventures and YZR Capital co-led the seed round, joined by Arcas Ventures, Golden Egg Check, Devico Invest and several angel investors. The Research Council of Norway provides the non-dilutive portion. Total funding to date stands at $8.8 million.

The problem with static well plates

Researchers increasingly work with organoids and fresh human tissue, but static well plates cannot reproduce the flow and oxygen conditions these models need. That limits tissue viability, the length of experiments and the amount of data collected. Vitroscope's automated platform maintains controlled flow through living tissue, enabling longer experiments and more data.

Its current product, vitro.alive, combines programmable perfusion, real-time control of oxygen, pH and temperature, and live-cell imaging in a benchtop system that runs six independent experiments in parallel. It works with standard inverted microscopes, so labs can keep their existing tissue models.

Early results

Working with Instant Bio, Vitroscope maintained vascularised human brain organoids under perfusion for seven days. In separate work, primary human liver cells formed organised tissue on the platform but not in standard well plates. A further study found that kidney cells lacking AdipoR1, a receptor linked to diabetic kidney disease, responded poorly to physiological fluid flow.

"Living tissue cannot be reduced to a snapshot," said co-founder and CEO Carlo Kriesi. Investors frame the longitudinal data as increasingly valuable for AI-driven drug development; YZR Capital's Markus Feuerecker called the platform "physical AI infrastructure".

What comes next

The money will fund the commercial rollout of vitro.alive and validation of vitro.scale, a higher-throughput system in development that will support 96 parallel experiments. Customer testing of vitro.scale is expected to begin in 2027, ahead of a planned 2028 launch. The company holds multiple international patents covering its core technology and methods.