Bexorg, Inc. announced the completion of a $23 million Series A financing led by Engine Ventures, bringing the company's total funding to $42.5 million as it advances the world's first integrated AI and whole-human brain platform for central nervous system drug discovery and development. The financing included participation from new investors Connecticut Innovations and E1 Ventures, alongside existing investors Amplify Partners and Starbloom Capital.
The New Haven-based company is addressing a critical challenge in pharmaceutical development: industry reports indicate that clinical trial failure rates in CNS drug development exceed 95%, largely attributed to the inadequacy of cellular and animal models in accurately capturing human biology.
Revolutionary Platform Technology
Bexorg's platform represents a paradigm shift in CNS drug discovery, utilizing comprehensive human datasets generated from wet-lab experimentation in a living system of diseased and non-diseased whole human brains. This data directly feeds AI models to generate high-fidelity targets, novel biomarkers, and go/no-go decisions with unprecedented accuracy and reliability.
"The support from this group of leading investors validates that Bexorg has established a new category of AI-enabled, whole human-brain infrastructure for drug discovery that identifies novel targets and biomarkers, unlocking new biology and opportunities in CNS drug development," said Zvonimir Vrselja, M.D., Ph.D., CEO and Co-founder of Bexorg.
Dr. Vrselja emphasized the ethical framework underlying the platform: "Through our platform, using donated whole human brains, we restore specific molecular activities essential for drug discovery, while the higher-level brain functions are not restored — honoring each gift by generating a depth of knowledge that could not be gained otherwise."
Addressing Massive Unmet Medical Need
The investment comes as over 70 million people worldwide face devastating neurological diseases including dementia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and multiple sclerosis. Ann DeWitt, Ph.D., General Partner at Engine Ventures, who will join Bexorg's board of directors alongside David Beyer from Amplify Partners, highlighted the platform's potential impact.
"It is inspiring to see novel approaches that just a few years ago would have seemed impossible become breakthrough technologies in one of our toughest disease areas," Dr. DeWitt said. "Bexorg's whole-human brain platform is redefining CNS drug discovery and enabling asset evaluation at rapid speed. We believe this approach will shorten discovery and development timelines, improve clinical trial success rates, and ultimately bring transformational CNS therapies to patients."
Rapid Platform Development and Partnerships
Since its founding by Dr. Vrselja and Dr. Nenad Sestan at Yale University in 2021, Bexorg has rapidly advanced its whole-human brain drug discovery platform. The company's foundational research, demonstrating that cellular and metabolic activity could be restored to postmortem brains hours after death, was published in Nature (Nature 568, 336–343 (2019)).
The company has established significant partnerships to advance its platform. In 2024, Bexorg partnered with the University of Oxford and the UK Medical Research Council as part of a collaborative effort to advance translational gene therapy development for neurological diseases. In mid-2025, the company announced a research collaboration with pharmaceutical company Biohaven Ltd. to advance two of Biohaven's preclinical development programs.
Expanding Data Repository and AI Capabilities
Over the past 18 months, Bexorg has significantly expanded its proprietary dataset to include hundreds of whole-brain experiments spanning Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and other neurodegenerative conditions, establishing one of the world's largest repositories of human CNS data. Building on this continuous growth, Bexorg is now training foundation models on petabyte-scale human brain molecular data, creating the first AI system grounded in experimentally measured human neurobiology.
Strategic Use of Funding
Proceeds from the Series A financing will be used to expand and optimize the company's AI engine trained on clinically predictive whole-human brain data and advance CNS discovery and development programs through partners and in-licensed assets. The funding will accelerate strategic partnerships and internal CNS development programs designed to showcase the predictive power of the fully integrated platform.
Bexorg operates under rigorous legal framework and bioethics standards, guided by an independent board of experts, as it continues to develop what the company describes as one of the most clinically predictive systems in neuroscience through its integration of the BrainEx platform with advanced AI models.
