Vivodyne to Replace Animal Testing With $40 Million Funding to Reverse 95% Clinical Trial Failure Rate

• 95% of clinical trials fail because animal testing is no substitute for human biology - Vivodyne’s robotics platform grows thousands of human tissues daily, directly tackling the biological gap behind clinical failures.
• Vivodyne’s AI generates clinically predictive human datasets, already in use by most of the world’s top pharmaceutical firms.
• Series A, led by Khosla Ventures, accelerates delivery of AI-led human predictive insights with a new 23,000 sq ft San Francisco facility.

Biopharmaceutical companies routinely cure diseases in animals during preclinical testing, yet those same therapies fail in human clinical trials nearly 95% of the time. By shifting from animals to an exclusively human optimization preclinical process, Vivodyne has raised $40 million in new Series A financing to scale its robotics+AI approach to testing on thousands of lab-grown, fully-functional human tissues, and the massive amount of human data they generate. With the new financing, Vivodyne will open a 23,000-square-foot fully robotic laboratory at Genesis Marina in South San Francisco. The new facility significantly increases preclinical human testing capacity to meet surging demand from global pharmaceutical clients, particularly spurred on by the recent commitments by FDA and NIH to move away from less-predictive animal models.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250528498236/en/

Vivodyne Chief Operating Officer Julie O'Shaughnessy (L) and Vivodyne CEO Andrei Georgescu (R).

The investment was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from new investors Lingotto Investment Management, Helena Capital, Fortius Ventures, and existing investors Kairos Ventures, CS Ventures, Bison Ventures, and MBX Capital.

Vivodyne’s advance is designed to get better drug candidates into human testing. Until now, preclinical R&D relied on experimental iteration that optimized candidate drugs so that they worked successfully in animals, without any human-specific refinement. Vivodyne allows the same refinement process but directly on human tissues, generating people-ready drug candidates for the first time.

“Vivodyne is fundamentally changing how drugs move from the lab bench to human trials,” said Andrei Georgescu, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder of Vivodyne. “A model that is only predictive 5% of the time isn’t a model. We’re redefining success in drug discovery by overcoming the limitations that have stalled scientific progress for decades.”

While animal models share proteins and pathways with humans, their similarities to human disease are often surface-deep, undermining their predictive power. Vivodyne enables large-scale clinical testing on lab-grown human tissues that can recapitulate the complexity of human disease, leading to more accurate results. This enables pharmaceutical companies to leverage these fully functional tissues across the entire preclinical pipeline, from initial target discovery through clinical candidate selection through safety and efficacy testing, significantly improving success rates in human trials. This has the potential to accelerate drug discovery by replacing largely unreliable, slow-growing animal models with vast, unified datasets of human tissue responses.

“Pharma has waited decades for scalable human data before clinical trials,” continued Georgescu. “We’re now generating data from tens of thousands of complex human tissues, capturing immune responses and disease states that were previously inaccessible. This unprecedented scale and resolution unlock entirely new avenues for drug development.”

Vivodyne removes the scientific uncertainty of relying on animal models for testing by producing human multi-omic data, including imaging, single-cell transcriptomics, and proteomics from more than 10,000 independent human-tissue experiments per robotic run. Vivodyne’s tissues are a thousand times larger than typical organoids, enabling detailed, functional analyses of human drug responses. Its fully automated robotic workflow ensures reproducibility at AI-scale throughput, generating more reliable, human-relevant data annually than all U.S. clinical trials combined.

"Robotics and AI are already starting to fundamentally change the healthcare landscape and Vivodyne is pioneering the way there," said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. "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.”

Most of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies rely on Vivodyne’s technology because drug failures often stem from flawed assumptions about biological targets, pathway mechanisms, and how those pathways affect human tissues.

Vivodyne’s AI-driven platform actively designs and optimizes a wide range of therapies, including small molecules, biologics (antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates), mRNA-based lipid nanoparticles, and cell therapies.

Ileana Pirozzi, Lingotto Investment Management, added, “Vivodyne’s systems grow over 20 distinct human tissue types, including bone marrow, lymph nodes, liver, lung, placenta, and models diseases such as cancer, fibrosis, autoimmunity, and infections. With AI assistance, these systems iteratively learn and improve, actively adapting to optimize therapeutic discovery and patient stratification outcomes.”

About Vivodyne

Vivodyne is rendering inaccurate animal testing obsolete, using automated robotic platforms and AI to grow and analyze thousands of fully functional human tissues. Pharmaceutical companies historically have spent millions on clinical trials destined to fail 95% of the time because animal models are poor predictors of human biology. Vivodyne solves this problem by providing unprecedented, clinically relevant human data at massive scale. Already used by most top pharma companies, Vivodyne’s platform significantly reduces trial risk, accelerates drug discovery, and brings safer, more effective therapies to patients faster. For more information, visit www.vivodyne.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250528498236/en/