Orakl Oncology raises $34m Series A to take its lab-grown tumour models into lung and gastric cancer

Orakl Oncology, a Paris TechBio company that grows patients' tumours in the lab and uses AI to forecast how cancer drugs will fare in trials, has closed a $34m Series A. Norrsken VC and Singular co-led the oversubscribed round, which one report put at roughly €30m. It lifts the three-year-old company's total funding to $50m, and will pay for new cancer types, a bigger dataset and teams in the US and UK.

New backers include InfraVia Growth, Serena, the Patient Autonome Fund run by Bpifrance, teampact.ventures and Plug and Play. Verve Ventures, Speedinvest and HCVC, all earlier investors, put in more money. Angel investors Mostafa El Sayed, Stan Polu, Thomas Wolf and Jacques Boitreaud also took part.

The company has also signed up Philip Tagari, chief scientific officer at insitro, as an adviser. Tagari spent 24 years at Amgen, where he ran a discovery organisation of more than 600 scientists and worked on Lumakras, the first KRAS inhibitor to win approval, and on the lung cancer drug Imdelltra.

From a Gustave Roussy lab to 18 of the top 20 drugmakers

Orakl was spun out of Gustave Roussy, the French cancer institute, in 2023. It is run by three scientists: chief executive Fanny Jaulin, chief technology officer Gustave Ronteix and chief operating officer Diane-Laure Pagès. The team now numbers more than 40, and almost a third hold a doctorate.

The method starts with real tumours. Orakl takes samples from patients at partner hospitals, grows them as organoids and ties each one to the patient's medical record and to genomic and other molecular readouts. The company calls these cohorts virtual patients. It then runs drugs against them in large batches and feeds the results into its models, which it says can predict response years before a compound enters the clinic.

It sells two products to pharma groups. O-Predict supports go or no-go calls on clinical trials, such as which drug to push forward and which patients to enrol. O-Target is aimed at finding new targets.

The commercial side moved fast. A little over a year after launch, Orakl says 18 of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies sit in its sales pipeline, and some first projects have turned into multi-year deals. One of those involves assessing oncology assets for Sanofi, according to one report.

The headline claim is a 90% accuracy rate in calling trial outcomes ahead of time, including forecasts that matched recent pancreatic cancer readouts. That figure comes from the company and has not been independently checked. The problem it targets is well documented: an industry study cited by Orakl found that about three in four cancer candidates fail at Phase 2.

"We believe the next breakthrough will come from making tumor and patient biology predictable," Jaulin said.

Where the $34m goes

Orakl split its plans into four areas:

• Models: a larger dataset and a bigger AI research team in Paris.
• Cancer types: five times more experimental data, and a move beyond colorectal and pancreatic cancer into non-small cell lung cancer and gastric cancer.
• Pharma work: new teams in the US and the UK to run its predictions across more than 10 drug programmes for partners.
• Discovery: a push to find and validate new co-targets straight from patient samples and perturbation screens, testing candidates on its own models in a loop with the AI.

The data side depends on hospitals. Orakl said it is negotiating contracts with more than 15 additional cancer centres across Europe, North America and Asia. Those sites supply the tissue that every model is built on, so the pace of signing them will shape how quickly lung and gastric work can begin.

Agate Freimane, general partner at Norrsken VC, framed the bet around waste in late-stage development. "Too many drugs still enter expensive clinical trials without a clear view of which patients they will work for," she said. In her view, the mix of proprietary data, hospital ties, lab capacity and software would be hard for rivals to copy.

A steep step up from the seed

The size of the jump matters for anyone tracking French biotech. Orakl raised €3m in a pre-seed led by Speedinvest in October 2023, then €11m in a seed round led by Singular in December 2024, with support from Bpifrance. The new round is roughly three times the seed, and Singular has now led or co-led two rounds in a row.

It also shows where AI money in drug development is heading. Much of the capital in recent years has gone to companies that design molecules on a computer. Orakl's pitch is that design is no longer the main bottleneck. The harder question is whether a drug works in a given patient, and that needs wet-lab data from human tumours, which takes time and hospital partnerships to build.

The next test is commercial. Orakl now has to turn a pipeline full of big-pharma names into paid, multi-year programmes from its new US and UK bases, and show that its accuracy holds once it moves beyond the two cancers where it started.