Institut Pasteur spin-out in €1.5 M round

Funding round completed

Ariana Pharma, a specialist in decision support tools to accelerate drug discovery, has raised €1.5 million in a first-round funding arranged by Vizille Capital Innovation, a venture capital subsidiary of the French bank Crédit Mutuel – CIC.

Paris-based Ariana has been mainly self-funding until now. The company has collaboration and licensing agreements with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including Pfizer, GSK, Novartis and Lundbeck.

The lead product, KEM (Knowledge Extraction and Management), is designed to accelerate and improve the discovery, development and safety of pharmaceutical products. KEM comprehensively mines data, including information that other systems overlook, supporting simultaneous decisions involving multiple criteria and objectives.

For example, in clinical trials, KEM can fully characterise populations that are most responsive, as well as populations at risk, impacting the outcome of the trial as well as focusing the post-launch marketing.

The new funding will be used to further develop Ariana’s decision-support tools, strengthen sales and marketing and enable the company to add functionality to KEM, enhancing its clinical trials and drug safety domains, interfacing with current industry standards and providing the new ability to detect early signals.

“We welcome the new funding which will provide an additional boost to our activities as we expand further the capabilities of KEM,” said Mohammad Afshar, Ariana Pharma’s CEO. “We have successfully developed our business and established profitable partnerships with a number of pharma and biotech companies, and we look forward to moving into the next phase.”

“Ariana now has a tried and tested technology which can be applied in a wide and growing market,” said Karine Lignel, Director of Investments, Vizille Capital Innovation. “It also has a management team with experience in rapidly developing enterprises.”