Austrian biotech HeartBeat.bio raises €4.5M pre-Series A round

Austrian biotech startup HeartBeat.bio has raised €4.5 million in a pre-series A funding round to drive the development of an organoid screening platform for cardiac drug discovery. The investors included i&i Biotech Fund, Invest AG, aws Gründungsfonds II, and Tensor Ventures, Startup Rise EU reports.

• Founded in 2021, HeartBeat.bio is a biotech company building a highly scalable human organoid and AI-supported drug discovery platform for heart disease, Cardioid Drug Discovery Platform. It facilitates the transition from traditional pre-clinical development to an animal-free, human-centric drug discovery approach.
• The company’s new approach starts from target identification and validation, disease modeling, hit identification, and confirmation up to lead compound development, drug profiling, and finally clinical trials-in-a-dish. Along with high-content-imaging and AI-based software, the platform is designed to develop first-in-class drugs faster, less expensively, and with a higher clinical success rate.

“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,”

Michael Krebs, CEO of HeartBeat.bio, shares the future plans.

• The round was co-led by i&i Biotech Fund, a Luxembourg-based VC firm investing in Life Sciences, Invest AG, a leading Austrian private equity fund, aws Gründungsfonds II, also an Austrian VC fund with a fund volume of around € 70 million, and Tensor Ventures, a global deep tech fund based in Prague and Luxembourg.
• Including this investment, HeartBeat.bio has secured a total of €10 million in private and public funds since company foundation in 2021.