Euphoria in Milan: Italian Nanophoria closes €83m financing round in heart failure

Italian biotech company NanoPhoria Bioscience has raised €83.5 million in a record-breaking Series A round to accelerate development of its lead therapy for heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) and expand its proprietary nano-in-micro drug delivery platform. The financing round was led by the still rather new investor XGEN Venture, the longtime venture professionals of Sofinnova Partners, and CDP Venture Capital, with participation from Panakès Partners and one undisclosed investor.

Heart failure affects more than 60 million people worldwide. In healthy adults, the ejection fraction—the percentage of blood pumped out of the left ventricle with each heartbeat—typically ranges between 50 and 70 percent. In patients with HFrEF (heart failure with reduced ejection fraction), this value drops below 40 percent, meaning the heart can no longer pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs. Current treatments — such as ACE inhibitors, beta blockers, or SGLT2 inhibitors — aim to reduce symptoms and disease progression but cannot directly restore cardiac contractility.

NanoPhoria’s investigational therapy NP-MP1 seeks to change that. The first-in-class peptide targets L-type calcium channels in heart muscle cells to improve contractility and thus ejection fraction. Delivered via the company’s lung-to-heart nano-in-micro system, NP-MP1 has shown strong efficacy in preclinical models. The delivery method is based on inorganic calcium phosphate nanoparticles.

“This financing is a transformational milestone,” said Claudio De Luca, CEO and co-founder. “It allows us to bring our therapy into early clinical trials and expand our pipeline toward other chronic diseases.”

Investors see NanoPhoria’s approach as a potential paradigm shift in cardiovascular medicine. “Its platform enables potent therapeutics to reach the heart more effectively,” said Paolo Fundarò, Managing Partner at XGEN Venture. XGEN is currently and still investing out of its first fund, XGEN Venture Life Science Fund, launched in 2022, and focusing on early-stage investments across biotechnology, medical devices, and diagnostics. Sofinnova’s Henrijette Richter added: “We believe this innovation can redefine treatment options for millions of heart failure patients.”

Founded in 2022 as a spin-off of Italy’s National Research Council (CNR), NanoPhoria represents a growing wave of European startups combining advanced materials science with precision cardiology. European precision cardiology startups use AI, digital twins, and novel devices to provide personalized cardiac care. Examples include inHEART (France), which creates digital heart twins from patient data for treatment and risk stratification, Idoven (Spain), an AI platform detecting heart disease signs from body sensor data, and Certis Therapeutics (France), which uses thermal ablation devices with advanced image processing for precise treatments. Other areas include personalized nutrition (Verdify, Netherlands) and inhaled therapies for arrhythmias (InCarda Therapeutics, France).