The Moon Venture leads ArcaScience’s first institutional round as the startup scales in the US and UK.
AI healthtech startup ArcaScience has raised $7 million in seed funding to expand internationally and advance its benefit-risk assessment platform for drug development. The round was led by The Moon Venture with participation from Pléiade Venture, Plug&Play Ventures, Bpifrance, and AKKA Technologies.
Founded by Romain Clement, ArcaScience is tackling inefficiencies in how new medicines are evaluated. Its AI platform transforms unstructured biomedical data into benefit-risk insights that help regulators, pharmaceutical firms, and clinicians assess drug candidates more effectively.
Clement said: “It takes 10+ years to bring a drug to market. There is a 90 per cent fail rate and the average cost per drug that makes it to the market is $2.3 billion. Benefit-risk prediction is no longer a nice-to-have, but a prerequisite for building better drugs. This funding round will help us scale our product, and bring real benefit-risk clarity to both the pharma industry and patients.”
ArcaScience already works with 10 global pharma companies including Sanofi, AstraZeneca, GSK, and Takeda, as well as research institutions such as the Paris Brain Institute. The company is also part of a pan-European consortium tackling pediatric brain cancer with AI, alongside Sanofi, AstraZeneca, Roche, and Merck.
The startup’s platform has supported over 70,000 patients in chronic skin disease and is being used by clinical operations and pharmacovigilance teams to derisk trials and optimize drug development. With a global benefit-risk evaluation market estimated at $13 billion annually, ArcaScience sees significant growth potential as adoption of AI in healthcare accelerates.
The funds will support expansion into the US and UK, launch of patient-facing solutions in pediatric brain cancer and dermatology, and team growth to scale clinical applications.