£10m · Series A · Healthtech · Leeds, UK
Adsilico team and investors. Image: Northern Gritstone.
Adsilico, a University of Leeds spinout that helps medical-device developers test implants across synthetic patient populations, has raised £10m in Series A funding. PXN Ventures led the round, with Northern Gritstone and Parkwalk participating. The company says the capital will extend its virtual-heart work into neurovascular devices and grow its team from 14 to 34.
How virtual patients move design decisions earlier
Adsilico's Virtual Chimera platform builds fully synthetic hearts and blood vessels from anonymised clinical imaging, then combines those anatomies with physics-based simulations of how an implant behaves. The resulting populations can vary by sex, age, ethnicity, anatomy and disease severity. Device teams can use the studies to investigate questions such as product sizing, patient selection and where performance risk may concentrate before committing to later development and clinical recruitment.
That timing is the commercial mechanism. Heart valves, stents and other complex implants are expensive to redesign once laboratory work and trials are under way. A broader simulated population can expose anatomy-specific problems while a manufacturer can still change a design or narrow a study. Adsilico's product material says each engagement documents data provenance, assumptions, validation and uncertainty, with clinical review and risk-informed credibility assessment. That makes the output a structured evidence service for a stated development question, not a substitute for regulatory approval or human evidence.
From cardiac projects to a repeatable medtech service
The company says it has completed projects with heart-valve and neurovascular device makers. The Series A will extend its heart models into brain devices including flow diverters used to treat aneurysms, where clinical-trial populations can be particularly small. This gives the new capital a concrete test: whether Adsilico can turn early projects into repeat manufacturer engagements while maintaining validation standards across additional anatomies and device types.
The round also follows a £3.5m seed financing in 2024, when Northern Gritstone and Parkwalk backed the University of Leeds spinout. Returning investors provide continuity, while PXN's lead role adds a new backer for the hiring and product-expansion phase. The planned headcount increase from 14 to 34 adds capacity, but the more important milestone is evidence that the same study workflow can travel from structural-heart devices into neurovascular programmes without weakening clinical credibility.
