Atlas Bio raises $12.5M to simulate drug trials before Phase II
The Basel company trains on 2 million human tissue readouts, and a biotech is already running one drug workflow without animal testing. Creandum led the $10 million seed.
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Basel, Switzerland
Atlas Bio, founded in Basel in 2024, has raised $12.5 million from Creandum, First Momentum Ventures and LEA Partners to simulate patient-level drug efficacy and safety ahead of a Phase II trial, with the stated aim of replacing both those trials and animal studies.
Two rounds disclosed on the same morning
Atlas Bio came out of stealth on October 27, 2026 with $12.5 million. The figure covers two operations: a $10 million seed led by Creandum, and a $2.5 million pre-seed, previously undisclosed, led by First Momentum Ventures and LEA Partners. Katharina Wilhelm takes a board seat for Creandum.
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The company is headquartered in Basel and incorporated in Delaware with a Swiss subsidiary, a structure the Swiss outlet startupticker.ch confirmed on the day of the announcement. The money goes to the scientific and commercial teams, to validating the platform, and to onboarding enterprise clients through 2026.
Wilhelm gave her reason for writing the check in the announcement: “What excites us about Atlas is their ability to simulate trials without requiring sensitive treatment data.”
Two million RNA readouts, one foundation model
Atlas Bio trains a foundation model on roughly 2 million human tissue RNA readouts. The model simulates patient-level efficacy and safety signals for a drug candidate ahead of a Phase II trial. Simon Romanski, the CEO, came through KIT, EPFL and Stanford. Sebastian Bayer, the CTO, led large language model research at Google and worked on autonomous driving before that. Dominik Hartl, a former doctoral fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institute, runs scientific strategy.
Two customers are on the record, both described by category in the October 27, 2026 startupticker.ch report, with neither company named. One is a top 10 global pharma company. The other is a Basel biotech that has taken animal testing out of one drug development workflow.
Romanski states the ambition without softening it: “Atlas Bio is the end of Phase II as we know it, and the end of animal testing as the price of progress.”
A $4.1 billion market attacking a 70 percent failure rate
Roughly 70 percent of drug candidates fail in Phase II, the figure Tech.eu used to frame the round on October 27, 2026. The market built to attack that number is still modest: in silico clinical trials were worth $4.1 billion in 2026 and grow at 7.7 percent a year through 2030, according to Grand View Research, whose report page was last updated in July 2026. Germany holds the largest share of the European side, on the same source.
For a sector that promises to delete a whole trial phase, 7.7 percent is a quiet number. Pharma buys simulation as decision support today and pays for trials anyway. The good news for Atlas Bio is that the gap between those two figures, a 70 percent failure rate and a market growing in single digits, is the whole business case: every point of Phase II attrition that moves into software is value that nobody is currently counting in that $4.1 billion.
Our own records put the check in context. adsilico raised £10 million a day earlier to test medical devices on virtual patients, and Biolevate raised €30 million in September 2026 for life sciences AI. A $10 million seed sits below both, which is where a 2024 company with two disclosed customers should sit.
Selling to the pharma industry next door
So what does a Swiss address buy here? Pharma density. Atlas Bio sells into an industry whose European decision-makers work within a tram ride of its office, and its most concrete proof point so far is a Basel biotech that changed a workflow. European deeptech has spent years watching its best scientific teams raise in Europe and sell in Boston. This one is selling to the customers next door first.
We have seen the simulation pitch before, and we have seen it stall at the regulator. Basecamp Research raised $140 million in September 2026 on a related bet that biological data at scale changes what drug discovery costs. What is new in the Atlas Bio story is the order of operations. A paying customer changed a workflow first, and the regulatory argument comes after. Imagine if every European deeptech seed round came with a client already using the thing in production.
Watch two things over the next year. Whether that top 10 pharma client moves from a pilot to a program, and whether a second biotech drops animal testing on the strength of the model. One workflow is a reference. Two is a category.
Europe does not need to out-spend American biotech capital to win this one. It needs to prove the simulation in the buildings where the drugs are already made. Basel is the right place to try. Let’s see the second customer.
Atlas Bio’s record and its funding history sit on its Sesamers profile, and every European round we track is in the fundraising data.
