Tolemy Bio raises €1.4m to build AI control panel for cell biology

The round was led by Norrsken Evolve, with participation from Big Sur Ventures, JME Ventures, Masia and a new UK stealth fund. Tolemy Bio said the capital will be used to expand its data generation, machine learning and engineering capabilities, further develop Orbit, and support early deployments with academic and industry partners.

Tolemy Bio is targeting a persistent bottleneck in modern biopharma: the difficulty of turning complex cell biology experiments into reliable, reusable intelligence. Cell therapies, therapeutic proteins and other cell-based products often depend on small changes in culture conditions, media composition or process parameters that can have a major impact on product quality, consistency and manufacturability.

The company’s core product, Orbit, is being positioned as an AI-enabled “control panel” for the cell. It is designed to sit on top of the tools scientists already use, integrating data from lab equipment, spreadsheets, notebooks and shared folders into a single workspace. The second layer of the platform combines “virtual cell” models with research agents intended to help scientists understand how living cells respond to changes in their environment and decide what to test next.

The company says Orbit has already attracted interest from organisations including MIT, the University of Cambridge, MFX and UK charity organisation Anthony Nolan, which are signed up for a phased roll-out.

From cultivated meat to AI

Tolemy Bio was founded by Alex Ward and Caelan Anderson, who previously worked together at Australian cultivated meat company Vow. Their backgrounds span cell biology, computational modelling, lab automation, software engineering and cell culture process development. According to the company’s website, Tolemy describes itself as “the AI-native virtual cell platform for therapeutic development and manufacture” and operates from Cambridge and Barcelona.

“During my time working in the lab, it became clear to me that cell biology is still too difficult to interpret, optimize and reproduce,” said Alex Ward, co-founder and CEO of Tolemy Bio. “Teams generate huge amounts of experimental data, but too often that data does not become reusable intelligence. We founded Tolemy Bio to change that.”

A key focus for the company will be the generation of experimental datasets needed to train and validate its virtual cell models. Tolemy Bio said it will use both internal laboratory work and partner data to improve how Orbit interprets cell behaviour and recommends future experiments.

Earlier this year, Tolemy Bio partnered with California-based GeminiBio to launch aiMOS, an AI-enabled media optimisation service for cell therapy manufacturing. GeminiBio said the service combines AI, machine learning (ML) and multi-omics data to design custom media supplements aimed at improving performance, consistency and scalability in cell therapy manufacturing.

Competing in biopharma’s AI infrastructure race

The company is entering a crowded but fast-moving field in which large pharmaceutical groups are investing heavily in AI for drug discovery and development. Tolemy Bio’s pitch is that smaller and mid-sized biopharma companies need access to similar infrastructure without building it internally. The commercial challenge will be to show that its platform can move beyond data organisation and deliver experimentally validated improvements in cell-based development and manufacturing.

Rebecka Löthman Rydå, General Partner at Swedish VC firm Norrsken Evolve, said the investor was attracted by Tolemy Bio’s focus on infrastructure rather than “another AI tool for biopharma”. Norrsken Evolve, which closed a €57m pre-seed fund in 2025, backs early-stage European companies working on resilience and sustainability themes, including biotechnology and health tech.

Tolemy Bio said its team will remain officially based in Cambridge, UK, while largely operating and deploying from Barcelona for the foreseeable future.