French AI healthtech startup ArcaScience has secured $7 million in seed funding to expand its artificial intelligence platform that dramatically accelerates drug benefit-risk assessments in pharmaceutical development. The round was led by The Moon Venture, with participation from Pléiade Venture, Plug&Play Ventures, Bpifrance, and AKKA Technologies.
Founded in 2018 by Romain Clement, ArcaScience addresses critical inefficiencies in drug development where traditional benefit-risk evaluations can take months to complete. The company's AI platform integrates more than 100 billion biomedical data points and employs multiple specialized AI models to assess risk-benefit profiles of drug candidates in seconds rather than months.
Addressing Industry-Wide Challenges
The pharmaceutical industry faces significant obstacles in drug development, with a 90% failure rate and average costs of $2.3 billion per successful drug that reaches market over a 10+ year development timeline. According to ArcaScience, up to 90% of valuable biomedical data remains unused due to its siloed or unstructured nature.
"Benefit-risk prediction is no longer a nice-to-have, but a prerequisite for building better drugs," explained Romain Clement, founder and CEO at ArcaScience. "This funding round will help us scale our product, and bring real benefit-risk clarity to both the pharma industry and patients."
Platform Capabilities and Market Adoption
ArcaScience's platform federates disparate data sources, from clinical studies to real-world evidence, extracting key indicators including adverse events, biomarkers, patient profiles, toxicity measures, and patent information. The technology has already gained traction with major pharmaceutical companies, with ArcaScience counting 10 pharma clients including Sanofi, AstraZeneca, GSK, Takeda, ICON, and the Paris Brain Institute.
The platform has been utilized by over 70,000 patients in chronic skin diseases and is being adopted by clinical operations and pharmacovigilance leaders to derisk clinical trials and optimize drug development processes.
Strategic Partnerships and Expansion Plans
ArcaScience is a member of a newly formed pan-European consortium focused on combating pediatric brain cancer with AI. The consortium, created by Sanofi and Imagine for Margo, includes the Paris Brain Institute, Institut Gustave Roussy, Medical University of Vienna, and major pharmaceutical companies such as AstraZeneca, Roche, and Merck.
The funding will fuel expansion into the US and UK markets, launch ArcaScience's first patient-facing solution focused on pediatric brain cancer and dermatological diseases, and support team growth including hiring a chief medical officer.
Market Outlook
The global benefit-risk evaluation market is valued at $13 billion annually. As AI adoption in healthcare accelerates, industry experts predict that 80% of pharmaceutical companies will rely on AI solutions for benefit-risk evaluation by 2026.
"ArcaScience is solving a critical need in the pharmaceutical industry with a groundbreaking technological approach," said the team at The Moon Venture. "We've seen remarkable market traction to date, and we believe they are ideally positioned to have a major impact in the pharma and patient care industries."
