British life sciences startup Kiin Bio has secured an oversubscribed €1.9 million pre-Seed investment round to launch their Virtual Scientist Platform for drug discovery, KiinOS – with a later launch of a community edition for researchers scheduled for later this year.
The funding round was led by b2venture with participation from Heartfelt, rule30, and several strategic angel investors. With the fresh capital, Kiin Bio will grow its client base, enhance its AI capabilities, and scale its team.
“The future of drug discovery isn’t just better tools and data, it’s smarter integration. We see a future where an AI-driven Platform unifies this fragmented landscape, turning thousands of disjointed solutions into a cohesive engine for breakthroughs,” said Filippo Abbondanza, CEO and Co-founder of Kiin Bio. “We’re happy to have won such renowned investors who back our mission to build the pioneering Virtual Scientist Platform for drug discovery.”
Founded in 2024, Kiin Bio is building an AI-native Virtual Scientist Platform for drug discovery. Its unified platform integrates virtual scientists, an agentic marketplace, and scalable infrastructure to streamline “everything from literature review and bioinformatics through to wet-lab execution“. Backed by investors and active pilots through its Frontier Programme, Kiin Bio aims to unify the drug discovery process with an AI-driven platform designed to accelerate research and unlock faster, smarter innovation.
The team includes expertise in AI, bioinformatics, cloud infrastructure, and drug discovery:
- Filippo Abbondanza (CEO) holds a PhD in Bioinformatics and was previously Product Director at Lifebit, where he developed and scaled multiple AI-driven platforms to help pharma identify and analyse the right data.
- Mark Davies (CDSO – Chief Data and Scientific Officer), brings over 20 years of experience in developing technology and data products for life sciences. He was SVP Informatics & Data at Benevolent AI and previously a technical leader at EMBL-EBI, where he developed major open biomedical resources like ChEMBL and SureChEMBL.
- Bogdan Urse (CTO) is a cloud infrastructure expert bringing over 10 years of experience delivering large-scale digital systems across multiple cloud providers and previously worked at Lifebit.
Kiin Bio looks to tackle one of the biggest challenges in drug discovery: the costly and fragmented R&D process that can reportedly take up to 3.7 million hours across hundreds of scientists to bring a single drug to market.
According to data provided by Kiin Bio, the drug discovery GenAI market is set to generate up to €96 million in the coming years. While individual technologies exist to support researchers across thousands of daily tasks, Kiin Bio believes there is no unified framework connecting them, resulting in missed productivity gains.
The startup looks to close this gap by building an integrated platform that streamlines the entire process from discovery to development.
Already in motion through the Frontier Programme, Kiin Bio has initiated three pilot projects, secured three commercial partnerships and won an European grant from the ELSA Industry Awards for its AI innovation.
“Kiin Bio is building the missing layer in BioTech: an AI-native agentic infrastructure that redefines how drug discovery is done, tackling a huge global, and fragmented market. Their groundbreaking approach of orchestrating all relevant tools and solutions into a cohesive Virtual Scientist Platform is bold, timely, and transformative”, said Andreas Goeldi, Partner at b2venture. “We’re excited to be backing this strong team. Right from the start we have been impressed by their unique blend of scientific depth, technical execution and business acumen.”