Addressing pain points in organoid sorting: the Orgadroid
Organoids are a feat of science that you might not have heard of: as cultures that are grown in labs, either from pluripotent stem cells or cells taken from a specific tissue, they mimic the structure, function, and biology of an organ. This is because researchers and scientists can use them to test, for example, how an organoid (mimicking an organ such as lungs, or a heart) might react to a new medicine being developed. They can also study the development of disease, along with personalised medicine, gene and cell therapies, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine.
In other words, organoids play a hugely important role in providing insight into the human body and disease, and because of that, they’re extremely valuable.
Traditional handling techniques in the laboratory, however, represent a bottleneck prohibiting market growth. This is what Visienco believes – a Swiss-based life sciences startup founded to address pain points in the organoid industry.
According to figures from The Insight Partners, the organoid market is projected to hit $15.01 billion by 2031, with a CAGR of 22.43% between 2023-2031. It noted that rising demand for novel drug screening services and an uptick in the popularity of personalised (‘precision’) medicine are contributing factors to this market growth.
Visienco believes that it can unlock further growth through the development of its automated organoid sorting solution. The startup was spun out of CSEM, a non-profit Swiss technology centre with a strong expertise in life sciences and especially in the field of organoids, in 2025.
“The more I read about organoids and the level of applications for me, the more it made sense for me to work in this field,” explained Edwige Guinet, Co-Founder and CEO of Visienco.
Guinet met her co-founders, Lucie Jandet and Jonas Goldowsky, while they were in the process of spinning out from CSEM. Having already founded a startup for mental health that sadly did not succeed, Guinet saw the opportunity to not only apply her learnings from her previous startup, but also to make a difference in people’s lives.
Organoid sorting technology
Visienco operates in the pre-clinical, drug discovery space, which refers to a stage of research that takes place before clinical trials and before people are brought into the equation.
Its technology, the automated organoid sorting platform, called the Orgadroid, took up to three years of research and development – a period of time that arguably speaks to the complexity of the problem Visienco is looking to solve.
“Organoids already have a lot of promise in terms of their applications,” said Guinet. “But they’re very painful to produce. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of care, and at one point you need to select the right organoids for drug screening.”
Typically this is done manually – a lab technician would devote a considerable amount of time to identifying and picking out the right organoids for their particular research.
“Several players in Switzerland working with organoids – a large research lab, big pharma – knocked on the door of CSEM, and they wanted to find a solution for that bottleneck,” she said.
What does a manual process look like? “Imagine a lab technician called Eric,” Guinet said. “He works in the lab, and he grows batches of up to 20,000 organoids, and it can take him up to eight months to grow them.
“You need to have organoids that are as similar to each other as possible. But to do that, it takes first a pipette, to take each organoid, one by one, under the microscope. Eric has to decide whether or not he wants to keep them, dispose of them, or select them for drug screening further down the line.”
The problem being that even if Eric could classify 400 organoids a day – a number Guinet added she thought was optimistic – this is still a slow throughput.
Sorting and classifying are the bottlenecks Visienco has concentrated its efforts on. Its automated sorting platform uses precision robotics to take care of the pipetting part of the processing, and an AI model combined with microscopy to identify which organoids should be set aside for later drug screening.
“We collect a lot of data about different batches of organoids on behalf of our clients,” said Guinet. “The idea is also to provide a feedback loop to labs so they can optimise their organoid production.” This means there is greater standardisation of processes and reproducibility – if labs have previous data they can draw on, they can identify the organoids that they need and the best way to produce them.
The three years of R&D was due to a number of factors: the team was dealing with a wide range of organoids, focusing on larger organoids that ranged from 500 microns to a few millimetres; they were working on different use cases which needed adapting to; and, importantly, there was no pre-existing technology that would allow them to handle organoids of that specific range gently without destroying them, which meant they had to rethink the process from scratch.
Find co-founders who align with you
Perhaps with the introduction of any automated technology, people see it as a threat to those performing the manual roles.
But Guinet stated that although some questions have revolved around what scientists think of the technology – in other words, do they find it favourable or do they view it as a threat – scientists have been excited about it. This has been a highlight for Guinet.
“That’s a huge driver, just to see you can really change their [scientists’] lives, and they can change people’s lives behind that,” she said.
Visienco is in the process of raising 2 million Swiss francs (£1,843,520) which they plan to use to launch the product in Europe, preparing their go-to market strategy for a launch in 2027.
Guinet credits the complementary skills she and her co-founders offer one another: Guinet brings her previous expertise of working within fast-paced startups and scaleups and possessing a business-oriented mindset, while Jandet and Goldowsky are both engineers who understand the technology.
Her recommendation for other founders, then, was to be surrounded by co-founders who are aligned with one another and have complementary skills.
“To be really honest and transparent with one another, I think it’s super important, it’s like getting married, in some ways,” she said. “You spend so much time together [and] you need to be sure that you can still bear each other’s presence after a few years.”
She also mentioned being resilient in the face of rejection and no’s, “a humbling process,” and finding solidarity in other founders who are experiencing a similar journey.
“It’s so different than discussing with consultants that have not tried to launch their own business,” she explained. “It’s really powerful to get insights from other founders and it really helps.”
As a female founder, it remains hugely important for Guinet that other women are encouraged into entrepreneurship, who have plenty to bring to tech startups.
“It’s a matter that women should take into their arms and not wait for men to do that for them,” Guinet concluded.
This article originally appeared in the September/October 2025 issue of Startups Magazine. Click here to subscribe
