Swiss company’s 1536-well technology aims to make transcriptomics cost-effective for primary drug screening and toxicology applications.
Alithea Genomics closed a CHF 6.9 million ($8.9 million) seed funding round to commercialize its high-throughput RNA sequencing technology for drug discovery and toxicology applications.
The Lausanne, Switzerland-based company raised an additional CHF 3 million ($3.9 million) in the latest tranche, led by Genku Ventures with participation from Novalis Biotech, Zürcher Kantonalbank, and private investors.
Proceeds will fund commercialization of Alithea’s 1536-well MERCURIUS DRUG-seq kits, which enable preparation of up to 1,536 RNA samples for sequencing in a single tube without requiring RNA isolation. The technology addresses cost and throughput barriers that have limited transcriptomics use in primary drug screening and exploratory toxicology.
“Alithea’s technology has reached a level of scalability and data quality that fundamentally changes what is possible in transcriptomics. This is not incremental progress—it is a step-change that unlocks industrial-scale biology for drug discovery, toxicology, and AI-driven research,” says Jan Van den Berghe, lead investor at Novalis Biotech, in a release.
Leadership Changes Accompany Funding
The funding coincides with leadership changes at Alithea. Frederik Decouttere, current chairman, will become chief executive officer, while co-founder and current CEO Riccardo Dainese transitions to chief commercial officer. Board member Kaspar Binz will assume the chairman role.
“This new funding will enable Alithea to unlock the full potential of our unique RNA-based technology platforms to a scale and price point that are unique to our industry,” says Decouttere in a release. “In a world where the impact of AI becomes more visible every single day and where high quality data is key to further improve AI models, Alithea’s RNA-seq platforms are set to accelerate our customer’s research, toxicology and screening projects significantly.”
Addressing Cost and Time Barriers
Traditional RNA sequencing sample preparation requires significant reagent volumes and manual operations, making it expensive and time-consuming for large-scale applications, according to a release from the company. Alithea says its BRB-seq and DRUG-seq technologies use massively multiplexed library preparation to reduce costs, time, and resource consumption.
RNA sequencing examines RNA quantity and sequences in biological samples using next-generation sequencing, revealing which genes are active and to what extent in response to drugs or environmental conditions. This data can guide drug discovery and development decisions.
The company says it will also invest proceeds in developing new technologies and building proprietary transcriptomic datasets for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications in the pharmaceutical industry.
Alithea Genomics was founded in May 2020 at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
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