Laidlaw Scholars Ventures is excited to be the co-lead in a £1.4m pre-seed fundraising into CardiaTec, alongside APEX Ventures, Crista Galli Ventures, O2H Ventures and Cambridge Enterprise. This is a strong consortium of investors that are all looking to actively support the business.
The business is building an AI platform that will use a wide variety of multiomic cardiovascular data to inform drug target discovery in cardiology. Despite the prevalence of cardiovascular diseases and the number of deaths linked to them, cardiovascular investment has lagged behind investment in other ailments, and LSV believes there is a significant opportunity to reduce the risk in drug development by using AI to improve the initial target assessment.
The LSV team first met with Raphael Peralta, CEO of Cardiatec and a Laidlaw Scholar from University of York, at the end of 2021 when we had just announced the launch of the fund. He was one of the first people to apply for our fund, and immediately he demonstrated his enthusiasm and knowledge of the platform Cardiatec is developing. Together with Thelma Zablocki (COO), he had managed to bring on Namshik Han as CTO, Head of AI at the Milner Therapeutics Institute at the University of Cambridge and Associate Faculty of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine, which demonstrated that he had the passion and drive to sell his vision, but also that this was an idea that was potentially game changing for cardiology. Further calls with industry experts, advisors to the Company, and other interested investors confirmed that this was a team that had the capability, knowledge and determination to succeed.
The team have been a pleasure to work with, and having anchored the round, we are delighted that the team has been able to bring in such a strong group of investors to support them in their development. Since we committed to the round, they have already managed to secure two machine learning engineers with specialist knowledge in medical applications, which means that they are now ready to scale their platform. They are truly passionate about their ability to improve patient outcomes through the development of targets that could over time be used to deliver personalised pathways of patient care.
As with all of our portfolio, if you are interested in learning more about CardiaTec for partnerships and job opportunities, believe you can help them achieve their goals, or simply wish to learn more about the team, do reach out to us at hello@laidlawscholarsventures.com.
CardiaTec is a pioneer in cardiovascular drug discovery with its AI-driven multi-omics drug target discovery platform. The platform combines first-in-class multi-omic datasets with bespoke data integration and machine learning analysis to deliver novel drug targets. Targets with the strongest in-silico and in-vivo validation will be out-licensed to top pharma and biotechnology companies to enable streamlined R&D efforts and transform the way cardiovascular therapeutics are discovered.
Raphael Peralta is the Co-Founder & CEO of CardiaTec. He is a graduate of the University of Cambridge MPhil Bioscience Enterprise, and holds an MSc in Industrial Biotechnology and BSc in Biology from the University of York. He has worked across various industrial settings on the translation of early-stage life science technologies, including consulting for cardiovascular life science companies. He is now determined to develop CardiaTec into a cornerstone company for the next generation of cardiovascular therapeutics, driven through the application of state-of-the-art machine learning capabilities.