adsilico raises £10M Series A to test devices on virtual patients

adsilico, a University of Leeds spinout, has raised £10 million in a Series A led by PXN Ventures, with existing backers Northern Gritstone and Parkwalk, to test medical devices on AI-generated virtual patients before those devices reach anyone’s chest.

Ten million pounds, led by PXN Ventures

adsilico announced the round on Monday, October 26, 2026. PXN Ventures led it. Northern Gritstone and Parkwalk, both already on the cap table, came back in, and Northern Gritstone put £5 million of the total to work on its own account (Northern Gritstone, October 26, 2026).

The company says the money goes into deeper work on its virtual heart models, an expansion into neurovascular devices such as flow diverters for brain aneurysms, and hiring. Headcount goes from 14 people to 34 (Northern Gritstone, October 26, 2026).

“Patients miss out on the chance of a life-saving device, or face uncertainty about whether it will work for them,” said Sheena Macpherson, CEO and co-founder, in the announcement.

Virtual hearts built at Nexus in Leeds

adsilico was founded in 2024 by Macpherson, Dr Nishant Ravikumar, Dr Zeike Taylor and Professor Alejandro Frangi, and works out of Nexus, the University of Leeds innovation hub. Its platform is called Virtual Chimera.

In plain words: generative AI reads anonymized clinical scans and builds virtual hearts and blood vessels from them, then physics-based simulation runs a device through virtual populations that vary by age, sex, ethnicity, body size and disease. A manufacturer can size an implant, flag the patients most likely to have trouble with it, and shape a clinical trial before recruiting a single person. The company has completed projects with heart valve and neurovascular device makers, and names no customers publicly.

The gap it sells into is measurable. A JAMA Internal Medicine study of 195 high-risk implant trials found women made up 33% of participants, falling to 29% in cardiovascular trials. Research for the US Department of Health and Human Services put the share of complex devices that enter non-clinical testing and go on to approval at 13.7%. “Medical device manufacturers need to know that their products will work for the people who receive them,” said Duncan Johnson, CEO of Northern Gritstone.

A $4.1 billion market compounding at 7.7%

The global in silico clinical trials market is worth $4.1 billion in 2026 and is forecast to reach $5.6 billion by 2030, a 7.7% compound annual growth rate (Grand View Research, report published November 2024, last updated July 2026). That is a steady market, and steady markets reward the supplier that is already approved and already integrated when the budget moves.

In our own fundraising data, £10 million puts adsilico alongside two other European simulation rounds of the last 18 months: Emmi AI’s €15 million seed in 2025 for industrial simulation out of Linz, which ended in an acquisition by Mistral AI in May 2026, and Zenithon AI’s €8.85 million seed on September 30, 2026 for physics world models. Of the three, adsilico is the one selling into a regulated clinical pathway, where the buyer is a device maker with a submission deadline.

The regulator moved first, the capital followed

So why does a Leeds lab raise £10 million for simulation in October 2026 and not in October 2023? The US FDA has issued guidance on how it assesses the credibility of computational modeling and simulation in device submissions, and in September 2026 it updated its drug and biologics rules to recognize computer models as an alternative to animal studies. The evidence became admissible, and the round came after.

I keep hearing that European deep tech is slow to commercialize. The reality is more specific than that. A company like this one has no market at all until a regulator says a simulation counts, and then it has every device maker in the segment as a possible customer, more or less at once. The good news is that Europe holds the research base these companies grow out of: adsilico from a Leeds lab, Emmi AI from Linz, Inovus Medical’s surgical simulators from St Helens. What we have been short of is the patience to fund them through the years when the rules had not caught up.

Imagine if the neurovascular work lands the way the heart work has. Flow diverters for brain aneurysms sit in some of the hardest anatomy in medicine, and the device makers aiming at it, including the ones running pivotal studies like HighLife’s mitral valve trial, are exactly the buyers who want that certainty before a pivotal study starts.

Remember: the companies that win a newly regulated market are the ones already in the room when the rule changes. adsilico was in the room. Watch the brain!