Norway's Vitroscope Raises $7 Million to Keep Living Tissue Under Flow

Norwegian biotech Vitroscope has raised a $7 million financing package, including a $5 million seed round co-led by Cerberus Ventures and YZR Capital, plus $2 million in non-dilutive funding from the Research Council of Norway. The Trondheim-based company builds automated perfusion platforms that keep living human tissue alive under controlled flow, so researchers can watch how it behaves over days rather than hours. Total funding to date stands at $8.8 million.

Arcas Ventures, Golden Egg Check and Devico Invest also joined the seed round, alongside angel investors Carles Reina, Fàtima Godall and Oskari Pétas.

Carlo Kriesi, Co-founder and CEO of Vitroscope, said: "We started Vitroscope because living tissue cannot be reduced to a snapshot. Its behavior depends on what is happening around it over time. With vitro.alive, researchers set those conditions themselves and follow how the tissue responds for days. This funding lets us bring this capability to more labs and extend it to higher-throughput experiments with vitro.scale."

What problem does the technology solve?

Standard laboratory well plates hold cells in a largely static environment. That environment cannot reproduce the fluid flow and oxygen conditions living tissues experience inside the body, which affects tissue viability, restricts experiment duration and limits the data researchers collect.

Vitroscope's systems run controlled fluid flow through living tissue while researchers monitor and adjust oxygen levels, pH and temperature. The setup supports longer experiments and yields more detailed information about how tissue responds to treatments and environmental changes. The company combines perfusion, environmental monitoring and live-cell imaging to study living tissues and vascularized organoids.

How do the two platforms differ?

The new capital funds two products:

• vitro.alive, the existing benchtop platform, now in commercial rollout. It supports six independent experiments, combining programmable perfusion with real-time monitoring of oxygen, pH and temperature, plus live-cell imaging. It works with standard inverted microscopes and existing tissue models.
• vitro.scale, a higher-throughput system designed to run 96 parallel experiments. Customer testing is expected to begin in 2027, with commercial launch planned for 2028.

What has the platform already shown?

Vitroscope has reported several research applications. In collaboration with Instant Bio, the company maintained vascularized human brain organoids under perfusion for seven days using vitro.alive.

In separate research, primary human liver cells formed organized tissue on the platform — a result not observed in standard well plates. Another study examined kidney cells lacking AdipoR1, a receptor associated with diabetic kidney disease, and found those cells showed impaired responses to physiological fluid flow.

These applications reflect the growing use of organoids and fresh human tissue in biomedical research, models that capture biological processes static cultures miss.

Why did investors write the check?

Chenny Zhang, Managing Director at Cerberus Ventures, said: "Biology isn't static, but much of the way we study it still is. Vitroscope is changing that by enabling researchers to observe living tissue over time, generating the rich, longitudinal data that will become increasingly valuable in an AI-driven world."

Markus Feuerecker, Founding and Managing Partner at YZR Capital, framed the platform as infrastructure for pharmaceutical development: "Drug discovery and development need data that allows researchers to actually predict how patients will respond, and Vitroscope generates it at the source. Its platform is physical AI infrastructure: every experiment on living human tissue produces proprietary, comparable data that compounds over time. For us at YZR Capital, Vitroscope is a key building block in rewiring the pharma value chain, turning cell-level insight into human-relevant evidence long before the first clinical trial."

What comes next?

The funding lands as regulators shift toward human-relevant methods. In September 2026, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration clarified that non-animal methods can support safety testing of drugs and biological products where appropriate. If vitro.scale hits its 2027 testing window, Vitroscope will enter a market where both regulators and AI-driven drug developers increasingly want longitudinal data from living human tissue.