Norwegian startup Vitroscope has secured $7M to sell equipment that keeps living human tissue alive in the lab for days, giving drug researchers a longer look at how medicines act on human cells. The money combines a $5M seed round with $2M in non-dilutive funding from the Research Council of Norway, meaning the company did not have to give up shares for that portion.
Cerberus Ventures and Munich-based YZR Capital co-led the seed round, joined by Arcas Ventures, Golden Egg Check, Devico Invest and angel investors Carles Reina, Fàtima Godall and Oskari Pétas. The round takes the company’s total funding to $8.8M.
Vitroscope says it will spend the money on the commercial rollout of its benchtop system, vitro.alive, and on validating a larger machine, vitro.scale. The company expects customers to start trying vitro.scale in 2027, ahead of a full launch in 2028.
“We started Vitroscope because living tissue cannot be reduced to a snapshot,” said co-founder and chief executive Carlo Kriesi. His work on the problem dates back to his time as a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. In 2019 he and colleagues described a flow chamber, a small enclosure that passes fluid over cells while they are imaged, and Vitroscope was registered in the city the same year.
Keeping Tissue Alive
Most labs grow tissue in static plastic wells that lack the flow of fluid and oxygen tissue receives inside the body. Lab-grown organoids and fresh human tissue struggle to survive in those conditions, cutting short the time scientists have to watch a drug at work.
Vitroscope’s equipment pumps fluid through the tissue much as blood flows through the body, a technique known as perfusion. The vitro.alive unit sits on a lab bench and runs six experiments side by side. Researchers can program the flow and adjust oxygen, acidity and temperature in real time while imaging live cells under a standard inverted microscope, the type that views samples from below.
Vitroscope says the system works with tissue models labs already use and is covered by patents on its core technology and methods. Its larger machine, vitro.scale, is designed to run 96 experiments at once rather than six.
Early Results And Investors
Vitroscope and partner Instant Bio kept vascularised human brain organoids alive under perfusion for seven days. The organoids are lab-grown clusters of brain cells that formed their own network of blood vessels. In other studies on the platform, liver cells organised themselves into structured tissue, and kidney cells responded poorly to fluid flow when they lacked a receptor linked to diabetic kidney disease. Receptors are proteins on the cell surface that pick up chemical signals.
The company’s website lists the University of Oxford, Harvard University, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the University of Helsinki and microscope maker Zeiss under the heading “Trusted by Leading Research Institutions”.
Both lead investors spoke about the gap between living biology and the way scientists study it. “Biology isn’t static, but much of the way we study it still is,” said Chenny Zhang, managing director at Cerberus Ventures. Markus Feuerecker, founding and managing partner at YZR Capital, went further. “Its platform is physical AI infrastructure,” he said.
Regulators And Rivals
US regulators have begun moving drug testing away from animals. In April 2025 the Food and Drug Administration announced a plan to phase out animal testing requirements, starting with monoclonal antibodies, the lab-made proteins behind many cancer and autoimmune drugs. The agency encouraged drug developers to submit data from organoids, computer models and organ-on-a-chip devices, which are small chips lined with living human cells. Its stated aim is to make animal studies the exception rather than the norm within three to five years.
Investors are backing other startups that aim to make early drug research more predictive. US company Vivodyne raised a $40M Series A in 2025 for its robot-run platform of lab-grown human tissues, and Barcelona’s ALLOX raised a $10.5M seed round last week for its work on hidden drug-binding sites on proteins.
Vitroscope’s case to drug researchers centres on time, keeping human tissue alive long enough to follow a drug’s effects over days rather than in a single snapshot. The company now plans to sell its benchtop system more widely while it prepares a larger machine for the volume of testing that drug makers run.
