[Funding alert] Austrian biotech Startup HeartBeat.bio Raises € 4.5 million Pre-Series A Round Funding

Austrian biotech startup HeartBeat.bio raises € 4.5 million pre-series A round funding. Invest AG, aws Gründungsfonds II, and Tensor Ventures.

The financing enables the completion of a ready-to-use, fully integrated, automated, high-throughput Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform for proprietary and collaborative drug discovery programs in indications with a high medical need such as drug-induced and genetic cardiomyopathies as well as myocardial infarction and fibrosis.

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While cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide, the development of effective therapeutic options is still limited due to high failure rate in clinical drug development and the lack of representative models that can adequately predict the physiology of the human heart.

Michael Krebs, CEO of HeartBeat.bio said: “This financing round is an important validation of our Cardioid technology and will help to unlock the platform’s potential to disrupt the cardiac drug development paradigm. We are proud to have received funding from four complementary investors with the financial capacity to continue funding in our Series A venture round, which is planned for 2025.”

Tomas Maršálek, CFO of i&i Biotech Fund said, "We believe HeartBeat.bio’s technology has real potential to contribute to more effective drug development to treat cardiovascular diseases. At the same time, we also see an ethical dimension, as the deployment of this technology will lead to a reduction in the number of animal experiments,“

Philipp Schupfer, Board Member of Inve st AG, and said,"HeartBeat.bio’s leading propr ietary Cardioid technology and revolutionary platform to scale the cultivation of cardiac organoids have huge potential to change the future of cardiovascular drug development,“ “As the leading Private Equity Fund in Austria, we are very pleased to support such an innovative Austrian biotech startup which is quite exceptional in this segment. We are very keen to support HeartBeat.bio and its strong team in the future and we are already excited about the coming years.”

About HeartBeat.bio AG

HeartBeat.bio is building the worldwide first high-throughput human organoid cultivation, screening and AI-supported data analysis solution for developing first-in-class drugs to treat heart failure; faster, less expensively and with a higher probability of success in clinical trials.

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The so-called Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform relies on self-assembling, highly reproducible cardiac organoids which recapitulate the human physiology and enable modeling of heart diseases in a way not achieved with other in-vitro systems.