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The Venture Codex

AstraZeneca

1 Francis Crick Avenue, Cambridge Biomedical Campus, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, CB2 0AA, United Kingdom

Overview

AstraZeneca is a biopharmaceutical company specializing in the discovery, development, manufacturing, and marketing of prescription medicines that make a meaningful difference in healthcare. It discovers new medicines that are designed to improve the health and quality of life of patients, offering added benefits such as reduced side effects or better ways of taking the treatment. It focuses on getting the best from every medicine it makes by exploring all the ways it can be used or improved.

Total investments
24
Lead investments
7
Investments · 12mo
3
Active investors
8

Sector focus

  • Biopharma
  • Biotechnology
  • Health Care
  • Medical
  • Pharmaceutical
  • Precision Medicine
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Investment portfolio

  • Syneron Bio

    Participated · Series B · Apr 2026

    Syneron Bio develops macrocyclic peptide therapeutics using its proprietary, high-throughput Synova™ discovery platform. The company's pipeline is diversified across oncology, autoimmune, metabolic, and rare disease indications. Syneron Bio plans to use the Series B proceeds to further evolve and scale its intelligence-driven Synova™ platform and to accelerate progression of multiple core programs into clinical development. The financing, which strengthened the company's cash position, includes participation from global life-science funds, sovereign wealth, strategic corporates and existing shareholders. Syneron Bio highlights improving platform efficiency and success rates as central to its future discovery and development efforts. The company is headquartered in Beijing.

  • Cassidy Bio

    Participated · Seed · Nov 2025

    Cassidy Bio is developing what it claims is the first AI-driven genomic foundation model that integrates proprietary wet-lab data, population-scale genomics and advanced machine learning to optimize the selection of guides, enzymes and delivery modalities for gene-editing therapeutics. By replacing today’s slow, trial-and-error approach with large-scale in-silico prediction and validation, the platform aims to increase precision, speed and clinical confidence in CRISPR-based drug development. The Tel Aviv-based startup’s end-to-end workflow ranks potential designs by safety and efficacy, with the goal of enabling reliable gene-editing medicines at scale rather than isolated successes. Its founding team combines serial biotech entrepreneur and CEO Rom Kshuk, CRISPR scientist Ayal Hendel, PhD, and AI specialist Yaniv Shmueli, PhD, and is supported by a scientific advisory board featuring former leaders from Editas Medicine, UPenn, Ultima Genomics and Intellia Therapeutics. Cassidy Bio plans to use newly raised capital to further train and validate its genomic foundation model and expand its wet-lab capabilities. To date, the company has secured $8 million in seed financing; no revenue, user or clinical metrics have yet been disclosed.

  • Promise Bio

    Participated · Seed · Oct 2024

    Promise Bio builds a cloud-based AI platform that detects different post-translational modifications (PTMs) in proteins from a single blood sample, replacing the need for separate tests for each PTM. The company emphasizes that it is focused on precision medicine for autoimmune diseases rather than being another AI drug-discovery firm. Founded in January 2023 and based in Tel Aviv, Promise Bio operated in stealth until recently. It is already working with multiple large hospitals in the U.S. and Israel and with drug companies including AstraZeneca and Pfizer. The company closed an $8.3M seed round in April 2023, led by Awz Ventures with strategic participation from AstraZeneca and Pfizer. Promise Bio plans to use the funds to hire additional staff and to build a database of PTM datapoints to support future research and development.

  • Mintify

    Participated · Equity · Aug 2024

    Mintify has built an NFT order book platform that allows users to discover, mint, and trade NFTs. Led by CEO and founder Evan Varsimis, the platform has seen strong growth, recording 140K active wallets and over 300K transactions in less than a year. Mintify is already deployed to Ethereum, Base, and Blast and plans to add Ordinals and support dozens of ecosystems and chains by the end of the year. The company is also expanding into gaming and digital art and plans to release its token later this year. Mintify intends to use new funding to expand operations and accelerate development efforts. The startup is based in Uniondale, NY and has raised a total of $5M to date.

  • Huma

    Participated · Series D · Jul 2024

    Huma is a London-based global healthcare AI company led by founder and CEO Dan Vahdat. It provides a modular, cloud-agnostic platform offering no-code configuration of regulated disease management tools, a library of pre-built modules, device connectivity, APIs, and a marketplace. The platform can host and deploy diagnostic and predictive AI algorithms and supports integrations to advance digital-first care and research. Huma's platforms are used by more than 3,000 hospitals and clinics, with over 35 million screened users, 4 million registered healthcare users, and support for over 800 studies covering about 1 million participants. With this Series D, the company is launching the Huma Cloud Platform, a technology ecosystem to support its digital health initiatives and enable others to launch and scale projects. Huma intends to use the funds to expand operations and its business reach and has now raised over $300 million to date. Huma offers a modular platform that supports digital 'hospitals at home' and decentralized clinical trials by combining real‑time smartphone and wearable data, predictive algorithms, digital biomarkers, and real‑world data. Its app lets clinicians monitor patients' symptoms and vital signs remotely and supports medical research and virtual trials. The company says its 'hospital at home' solution was deployed across 100+ clinics in Germany in a single day. Huma has raised more than $200 million in venture funding to date from backers including Bayer, Samsung and Sony. Founded in 2011 as Medopad by Dan Vahdat and Rich Khatib, Huma says the coronavirus pandemic accelerated progress on its virtual trials. The company plans further U.S. expansion and to act as an extended digital‑health arm for partners such as AstraZeneca. Huma Therapeutics operates a predictive healthcare platform that combines a proprietary predictive algorithm, biomarkers, and real-world data to deliver modular 'hospital at home' services and enable decentralized clinical trials. Its platform is reported to double clinical capacity and reduce hospital readmission rates by one-third. The company plans to scale its 'hospitals at home' offering in the UK and to support large decentralized clinical trials for pharmaceutical and research customers across the US, Asia, and the Middle East. The recent funding is intended to accelerate product rollout and research efforts. Huma was founded in 2011 by Dan Vahdat and Rich Khatib. Medopad builds AI-based methods to create and track digital biomarkers using apps, wearables and advanced sensors, working with pharmaceutical and tech partners to deliver end-to-end solutions. The company is developing biomarkers and therapeutics related to heart health in collaboration with Bayer and is also working on diagnostics for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and diabetes. Medopad has partnerships with Tencent for AI engine development and with teaching hospitals (including the Royal Hospital, Wolverhampton) for clinical trials such as tracking aortic stenosis. It is collaborating with Janssen on at-home cognitive tests to track early signs and progression of Alzheimer’s. Medopad emphasizes that patient data is collected with consent, anonymized when shared, and does not leave the country where it is collected; the company positions its algorithms and methods as its primary asset. Last year it signed deals totaling about $140 million with a group of Chinese firms, including Tencent, Ping An, and Chinese divisions of GSK and Johnson & Johnson. Medopad provides a platform for data capture and to improve communication between patients and healthcare professionals, powered by AI and machine learning to encourage proactive care and earlier detection. The company is London-based and says its technology helps make more people proactive and improve early detection rates. Medopad reports 400% year‑on‑year growth in the value of its projects since 2015. It has partnerships with technology and healthcare organisations including Tencent, HP, the NHS and Johns Hopkins University, and has secured about £100 million in partnership deals with companies including Tencent. Medopad plans to use new funding for global growth and intends to create 500 new jobs in the UK by 2020. The business has also appointed Stuart Fletcher (former BUPA CEO) and Simon MacKinnon (chairman of Sinophi Healthcare) as non-executive directors.

Team

  • Carl Sidenvall

    Project Manager

  • Michel Vandenberghe

    Director

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  • Laura Bonifacio

    Senior Global Clinical Operations Program Director

    LinkedIn
  • Bonnie Cheuk

    Senior Business and Digital Transformation Leader

    LinkedIn