The Venture Codex

Led · Grant · Oct 2024

Vandria SA is developing drug candidates that target mitophagy. Its two lead candidates are aimed at central nervous system (CNS) and muscle diseases, respectively. On Feb. 8, 2024, Vandria was awarded two grants totaling €3.8M (US$4.1M). The grants were awarded by Innosuisse and Eurostars. The funding is intended to support advancement of the company’s two lead drug candidates. Vandria discovers and develops first-in-class small-molecule mitophagy inducers that target a novel protein to induce mitophagy and provide anti-inflammatory effects, with strong genetic links to several human diseases. Its lead program, VNA-318, is aimed at early-stage CNS and neurodegenerative disorders to improve cognition and limit memory-loss progression. The company also maintains a pipeline of mitophagy-inducing molecules targeting muscle, lung, and liver diseases. Since the initial Series A close in December, Vandria has advanced its platform and lead program, expanded its team, and moved into dedicated lab facilities at Superlab Suisse on the Biopôle Lausanne campus. Vandria raised CHF4.2M in non-dilutive funding via two Innosuisse grants and an Eurostars grant to support preclinical work alongside its equity financing. Management plans to complete Single Ascending Dose (SAD) and Multiple Ascending Dose (MAD) Phase 1 studies of VNA-318 and, subject to positive Phase 1 results and regulatory approvals, initiate three parallel Phase 1b/2a efficacy studies in 2025. Vandria develops small-molecule mitophagy inducers aimed at rejuvenating cells to treat age-related and chronic diseases. Its lead program, VNA-318, is a brain-penetrant, patent-protected mitophagy inducer that has shown memory and learning improvement and disease-modifying effects in preclinical models of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. VNA-318 is expected to enter the clinic in Q2 2024. The company is also advancing mitophagy-inducing programs targeting muscle, lung, and liver diseases, and a separate program focused on ferroptosis. Vandria intends to use the Series A proceeds to expand operations and advance its development efforts. The company is led by CEO Klaus Dugi, CSO Penelope Andreux and Head of BD & Finance Peter Harboe-Schmidt, and is based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Led · Grant · May 2024

Correntics develops AI-enabled climate-risk management tools tailored to the agri-food sector. The company will use a EUR 1.5 million Eurostars grant to build a platform that integrates high-resolution weather models, crop-specific risk analysis, and supply chain shock modeling. Project partners include Cordulus (providing hyper-local weather forecasting), the Danish Technological Institute (contributing statistical models for weather extremes), and the EClim Group at the University of Zurich (developing an LLM-based recommendation system). The planned recommendation system will use large language models to deliver actionable risk-mitigation strategies to platform users. The platform aims to bolster resilience, support sustainable growth, and transform how climate risks are identified and managed across operations and supply chains; demand is rising as the agri-food sector is projected to surpass €6 billion by 2030. Correntics has been recognized among the TOP 100 Swiss Startups and won the final stage of Venture Kick in 2022, underscoring its track record of innovation. Correntics builds a Software-as-a-Service platform for supply-chain risk analytics that models long-term climate resilience across complete global value chains. The product emphasizes data-driven modelling and scientific data visualization to reveal complex interaction mechanisms and climate-related hazards. The company positions itself as distinct from peers through its focus on long-term climate resilience of end-to-end supply chains and advanced visualization capabilities. Correntics plans to use its recent award to further develop modelling capabilities and to launch the first enterprise version of its software early next year. The startup is expanding its Zurich team to increase sales into sectors prone to weather and climate risks, including food & agriculture, energy, infrastructure, and logistics. The company cites the broader market opportunity: a global supply-chain management market estimated at USD 19.8 billion and a supply-chain risk management software market projected at roughly USD 4.6 billion by 2025.

Led · Grant · Mar 2024

NEOGAP Therapeutics AB is building an autologous cell therapy platform called personalised Tumour Trained Lymphocytes (pTTL), which amplifies a patient’s own tumour-reactive T cells to fight cancer. The therapy combines the company’s proprietary PIOR and EpiTCer technologies with advanced DNA sequencing to create a precision, patient-specific product for solid tumours. NEOGAP is currently running a first-in-human Phase I/II trial evaluating safety and tolerability of pTTL in patients with advanced colorectal cancer; several patients have already been treated and initial safety data indicate good tolerability. Sweden’s Medical Products Agency has authorised dosing all study participants at the full dose, enabling a more efficient trial design. In parallel, the company has used support from its EU EIC grant to develop a scaled manufacturing plan together with CDMO NorthX Biologics in preparation for later-stage studies and commercialisation. Recent exploratory clinical signals are described as promising, and management is preparing for the next step in clinical development. No revenue or user metrics were disclosed in the article.

Led · Grant · Jan 2024

Tune Insight is a Swiss cybersecurity startup developing privacy-preserving machine learning and interoperability solutions for Electronic Health Records (EHR) in clinical settings. Its current project focuses on a federated learning platform to enable secure, patient-centered research across pediatric emergency departments. The platform is designed to create secure connections among hospitals and serve as a blueprint for collaborative clinical research using advanced privacy technologies. Initial deployment will be in partner hospitals in Italy and Switzerland, with the aim of expanding to the global Pediatric Emergency Research Network. Through that expansion Tune Insight expects to access data from over 100 hospitals and about 2 million pediatric emergency presentations yearly. The company has received recognition in Swiss startup programs and has engaged in seed fundraising activities to support growth. Tune Insight builds a platform that orchestrates secure collaborations on sensitive or confidential data across organisations, domains, and jurisdictions, enabling collective analytics, federated machine learning and approved computations while protecting data in use. The technology applies applied cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies and was spun out of several years of research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) to address personalised healthcare collaboration without transferring patient data. Tune Insight is deployed at University Hospital Zurich, CHUV in Lausanne, Inselspital in Bern and University Spital Basel, powering use cases such as survival analysis for precision oncology and the generation of personalised reference ranges. Its reference-range application leverages a collective dataset of 9 million data points from over 250,000 patients. The platform is also used in law, financial services and cybersecurity, and Tune Insight is extending support for privacy-preserving generative AI. The company aims to reduce data liability, streamline compliance and reinforce data security while enabling cross-jurisdictional collaboration. Tune Insight offers a software solution that lets groups of organizations run collective computations on sensitive data while keeping individual data on each organization’s premises. Its platform uses multiparty homomorphic encryption to perform computations under encryption and only release authorized final results. Customers can define the partner group, the data types to share, and the permitted operations and functionalities for that group. The product targets sectors that cannot freely share data for strategic or regulatory reasons, including health, insurance and cybersecurity. The company plans to expand its development team and create a sales and customer-satisfaction team to move from proofs-of-concept and pre-scale deployments toward recurring licensing revenue. The approach is rooted in years of EPFL research and emphasizes compliance with personal data laws and mitigation of data-leak risks. Tune Insight builds infrastructure-agnostic B2B software that enables secure collaborative analytics and machine learning across multiple organizations without transferring raw data. Its platform can be deployed on-premise or in cloud instances and keeps all communications and computations encrypted. The software enables federated scenarios where participants retain full control of their own data while extracting collective insights. The company emphasizes privacy-enhancing technologies (including homomorphic encryption expertise) and says its approach is fully decentralized, widely scalable, and more secure than federated learning without relying on trusted third-party hardware. The founding team includes CEO and co-founder Juan Ramon Troncoso Pastoriza, co-founder and COO Frédéric Pont, Romain Bouyé, and Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux, and the team highlights experience with sensitive health data. Tune Insight plans to capture opportunities across multiple domains where firms need to augment their datasets with external data while preserving trust and regulatory compliance. The company closed a pre-seed financing round with Wingman Ventures a few weeks after incorporation.

Participated · Grant · Nov 2022

Wastefront operates pyrolytic reactors that use thermal depolymerisation (pyrolysis) to break down end-of-life tyres and produce recovered carbon black (rCB) and pyrolysis oil. Its South Tyneside (Sunderland) plant is a £100 million project planned to be fully operational by 2025 and will convert material equivalent to 20% of the UK’s annual ELT supply into rCB. Integrating Wastefront’s rCB into new tyres is projected to reduce emissions for each tyre by 80%. The company aims to scale via licensing its ‘‘Wastefront Blueprint’’ and deploying multiple plants globally in partnership with industrial players. Wastefront has entered a strategic partnership with VTTI that includes an investment and commitments to develop additional sites. The market for carbon black and related products is expected to grow from $13 billion in 2022 to $18 billion by 2029, a tailwind cited in the announcement. Wastefront emphasizes turning a large global waste problem into saleable products sought in the energy transition. Wastefront operates pyrolytic reactors that use thermal depolymerisation (pyrolysis) to break down end-of-life tyres and produce recovered carbon black (rCB) and tyre-derived oil (TDO). The company is collaborating with Swedish engineering firm Hulteberg Chemistry & Engineering on HYFUEL, a project to purify pyrolysis oil for use as a renewable biofuel. HYFUEL’s optimised tyre pyrolysis oil can substitute for diesel without further refining, enabling lower-temperature applications, cost savings, and reduced carbon emissions. Wastefront has secured a €2 million grant and total project funding of €2.076 million to advance HYFUEL's use cases. The firm is building a £100 million tyre recycling plant in Sunderland, Northern England, due to be fully operational by 2025. The South Tyneside plant aims to process about 20% of the UK's end-of-life tyres and produce rCB, which Wastefront says can reduce emissions for tyres made with its rCB by 80%.