CryoCloud will use the new funds to fully automate its product, and further support its userbase which exceeds 25 countries and includes clients across academia, biotech, and Pharma companies. This latest investment comes after CryoCloud’s strong growth following its pre-Seed round of €500,000 in October 2023, and brings total funding to date to €2.8 million since the business was founded in 2021.

Cryo-EM has the potential to significantly derisk and accelerate drug development, bringing safer drugs and vaccines to market. Cryo-EM is a Nobel-prize winning technique that determines protein structures at the highest level of accuracy. CryoCloud’s platform delivers scientists their vital 3D protein visualisations using scalable Cloud infrastructure, in the space of hours, rather than months. Its automated approach makes this technology accessible to all researchers and scientists, who can sign up on CryoCloud in minutes. 

The high costs of drug development are primarily due to the significant number of failed programmes, with 80% of expenses attributed to these failures. Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and structure-based drug design enhance the likelihood of success in drug development, boasting a several times higher success rate compared to traditional methods. Utilising cryo-EM can lead to substantial cost savings in the drug development process by providing critical insights early on, enabling rational drug design and reducing the risk of late-stage failures.

Cryo-EM has typically required specialised expertise and substantial computational resources, which has made the technology inaccessible for many labs. Cryo-EM typically necessitates dozens of GPUs for data analysis, making it much more computationally demanding compared to other applications. The technology generates petabytes of data annually, requiring extensive storage and processing capabilities. CryoCloud has developed the first and only Cryo-EM SaaS platform, which uses machine learning and proprietary algorithms to automate cryo-EM data analysis. With CryoCloud, scientists can access infrastructure and workflows that would usually cost $ >200k at a fraction of the cost with no setup time. The platform provides scientists robust experimental validation of their target structure rather than computational predictions, and can process terabytes of data – 10-100x more data than other life science applications – in hours instead of days.

The demand for cryo-EM services is projected to reach €1 billion per year in the European market alone, within a multi-billion dollar global market. Structural biology and protein engineering services are expected to grow in 2025, with the pioneer of protein engineering   being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024.

"With CryoCloud, we have built the first cryo-EM platform that allows scientists to access petabytes of storage and dozens of GPUs in minutes rather than months, enabling scientists to run their cryo-EM projects faster and more effortlessly," said Robert Englmeier, PhD, Co-Founder and CEO of CryoCloud, who brings over 10 years of applied cryo-EM experience to the company. “It’s a turnkey solution: our customers tell us their productivity rates have increased and they have been able to expand and run their cryo-EM projects with greater efficiency and reliability. Our platform already delivers huge benefits today, and we’re excited to use this funding round to build the next generation of algorithms that will make the analysis even easier.”

Marta G. Zanchi, Founder and Managing Partner at lead investor Nina Capital, said: "We are proud to continue to support this highly specialised team transforming structural biology, starting with an innovative approach to cloud resources and workflow solutions for cryo-EM data analysis. We are excited to be joined in this latest round by new investors with domain expertise, all of whom recognise the timeliness of this market need and the relevance of CryoCloud's product.”