A University of Leeds spinout that tests heart and brain implants on computer-generated patients has raised £10m in a Series A funding round, which it said will be used to expand its AI and simulation technology and more than double its headcount.
adsilico, which was spun out of the university in 2024, plans to grow its team from 14 to 34 people at the Nexus innovation hub.
The round was backed by PXN Ventures, Northern Gritstone and Parkwalk, three investors that focus on northern businesses and university spinouts.
adsilico builds fully synthetic populations of virtual patients and uses them to assess how medical devices perform before they are tested on people. The company said the populations reflect real variation in age, sex, ethnicity, body size and disease.
According to the company, the aim is to inform costly development decisions earlier and to help close what it describes as a diversity gap in medical device testing, in which women, older patients and people with smaller or different anatomy are often under-represented.
adsilico said the technology could change how heart and brain implants are tested worldwide. Its work to date has centred on virtual hearts, and the new funding is intended to take it into other therapy areas.
The company was founded in 2024 by Sheena Macpherson, its chief executive, alongside Dr Nishant Ravikumar and Dr Zeike Taylor.
The investment comes as regulators in the UK and US press for evidence that medical devices work for everyone who needs them. In the UK, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has said it is working towards strengthened guidance for manufacturers on diversity in device testing, in response to the independent review of equity in medical devices led by Dame Margaret Whitehead.
Macpherson said: “This investment enables us to grow our team and extend our reach beyond virtual hearts into new therapy areas. Our mission is for our virtual populations to reflect real-world diversity, helping make implantable device testing faster, safer and more equitable for the patients who need it.”
She added: “The UK has world-class clinical and research talent, and from our base in the North with backing from UK investment, we set the global standard for virtual patients within a new dimension of in silico generated evidence that will accelerate the launch of safer devices to those that need them most.”
Dr Elizabeth Young, investment manager at PXN Ventures, said: “adsilico represents the level of groundbreaking innovation and deep thinking being spun out of universities across the North of the UK currently.”
She added: “What Sheena and the team have built has the potential to have a significant global impact for medical device manufacturers, the pre-clinical development process and, therefore most important of all, patients. PXN is excited to be joining at such a vital time for the business, supporting the team as it scales and sets new standards for in silico testing.”
Duncan Johnson, chief executive of Northern Gritstone, said: “Medical device manufacturers need to know that their products will work for the people who receive them, including populations that have been traditionally underserved.”
He said the company’s “use of generative AI to build realistic virtual hearts and blood vessels provides vital information to help understand how these products will work much earlier, spotting potential problems before committing to costly human trials.”
Dr Anne Dobrée, investment director at Parkwalk, which has worked with the company since its earliest days, said: “adsilico is exactly the kind of science we exist to back: deep, hard-won intellectual property out of the UK’s universities, with a real chance to change how medical devices reach patients.”
She said the company’s Virtual Chimera technology “tackles a problem that has held cardiovascular research back for years: a lack of diverse, representative data in clinical trials.”
Dobrée added that the latest round “gives the team the capital to turn that technology into partnerships that put it to work for patients at scale”.
Jamie Young
Jamie Young is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, covering SME finance, employment law and Westminster policy since 2016. He has reported on every Budget and Autumn Statement since 2018, helped make sense of the 'covid era' and the bounce-back loan scheme from launch through the fraud investigations, and broke the magazine's coverage of the 2024 late-payment reforms. He joined Business Matters straight from completing his BA in Administration from Exeter University and is NCTJ-qualified. Reach him at jyoung@cbmeg.co.uk
