Leeds spinout adsilico raises £10M to test medical devices on virtual patients

adsilico, a University of Leeds spinout, has raised £10 million in a Series A round to expand its AI and simulation technology for testing medical devices on virtual patient populations. The round was led by PXN Ventures, with participation from existing investors Northern Gritstone and Parkwalk, according to Tech.eu and a Northern Gritstone release, which says Northern Gritstone itself invested £5 million.

The company will use the money to extend its virtual heart models into devices for the brain, such as flow diverters used to treat aneurysms, and to grow its team from 14 to 34 people.

What adsilico does

Heart valves, stents and other implants usually reach the market after clinical trials of a few hundred patients. The Northern Gritstone release argues that recruiting a trial that reflects everyone who will later receive a device is slow and costly, and that participants tend to be disproportionately men. It cites a study in JAMA Internal Medicine of 195 trials of high-risk implants, in which women made up 33% of participants, falling to 29% in cardiovascular trials.

adsilico's answer is a platform called Virtual Chimera. It uses generative AI to build realistic virtual hearts and blood vessels from anonymised clinical scans, then runs physics-based simulations of how a device behaves inside each one, under clinical oversight. The virtual population can vary by age, sex, ethnicity, body size and disease, according to the release.

Device makers can use the results to decide, for example, which sizes of a device to make, or to identify patients who may be at higher risk before committing to more development or trial recruitment. The company presents this as evidence alongside laboratory, animal and clinical studies, not a replacement for them. It says the approach could also reduce reliance on animal studies.

Early customers

adsilico says it has already completed projects with makers of heart valve and neurovascular devices, and its cardiac work will be presented at TCT, a meeting focused on structural heart therapies, Tech.eu reports.

The team and the investors

adsilico was founded in 2024 by Sheena Macpherson, Dr Nishant Ravikumar and Dr Zeike Taylor, according to Tech.eu. Macpherson is CEO. The company is based at Nexus, the University of Leeds innovation hub.

The Series A follows a £3.5 million seed round in February 2024, in which Northern Gritstone invested £2 million and Parkwalk £1.5 million, according to Parkwalk. Taken together, the two disclosed rounds add up to £13.5 million. Lead investor PXN Ventures is new to the cap table.

"Patients miss out on the chance of a life-saving device, or face uncertainty about whether it will work for them, because people like them weren't represented when it was designed and tested," Macpherson said in the release.

Duncan Johnson, CEO of Northern Gritstone, said in the same release that adsilico's use of generative AI "provides vital information to help understand how these products will work much earlier, spotting potential problems before committing to costly human trials." Investors from PXN Ventures and Parkwalk also backed the company's approach in comments reported by Bdaily.

Regulators are moving in the same direction

The timing is helped by regulation. The release points to the UK's independent review on equity in medical devices, which found evidence that some groups may receive sub-optimal treatment because of bias in how devices are designed and used. In the US, the Food and Drug Administration has published guidance on using computer modelling as evidence in medical device submissions.

What it means for European founders and investors

adsilico is a good example of a deep-tech spinout turning university research into a product that industry will pay for. Its customers are device manufacturers, not hospitals or patients, and its pitch is about cost and risk. The release cites research estimating that only 13.7% of complex devices that enter non-clinical testing go on to reach approval. If simulations help a manufacturer spot a sizing or safety problem before a costly trial, the value is easy to explain to a buyer.

For founders in healthtech and AI, the round shows that "in silico" evidence is moving from academic interest to a fundable category. Regulators accepting computer models as part of the evidence base matters a great deal here: it turns a research tool into something that can shorten real product timelines.

For investors, the deal is also a story about regional capital. Northern Gritstone backs spinouts from northern English universities, and it has now invested in both of adsilico's disclosed rounds. Northern Gritstone and Parkwalk backing the company again alongside a new lead is a sign of conviction from insiders. It also fits a wider pattern of European capital going into applied AI, as covered in our look at Europe's Q3 tech funding, and UK policy aimed at scale-up finance, such as the plan to add capital to the British Business Bank.

The next test is commercial. Moving from heart models into neurovascular devices, where trials are smallest, will show whether adsilico can repeat its approach across therapy areas.

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