Vium Expands Digital Vivarium Technology With First On-Premises Customer Deployments

Company also closes $24M Series B financing including leading investors Lux Capital, Data Collective (DCVC), Dolby Family Ventures, Founders Fund and Future Shape LLC

June 21, 2018

SAN MATEO, Calif.– Vium, Inc., the innovator bringing the first living informatics approach to accelerate preclinical drug discovery and development, today announced the launch of its first on-premises product, beginning with the first product shipments of its Digital Vivarium technology. The on-premises product, which is in addition to the ongoing customer studies at Vium’s Silicon Valley Discovery Lab, allows pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to conduct effective animal studies with predictive, continuous digital data within their own vivarium settings. By applying life sciences, digital technology, and large-scale interpretive methods to living systems, Vium’s Digital Vivarium™ and Vium Cloud enable life science companies to more effectively prioritize compounds for further testing in a fraction of the time using traditional methods.

The company also closed a $24 million Series B financing led by existing investors Lux Capital and Data Collective (DCVC), with participation from Dolby Family Ventures, Founders Fund and Tony Fadell’s Future Shape LLC.

“There are 350+ million people battling rare diseases. Vium’s in vivo drug testing platform uses machine learning to deliver breakthrough accuracy and speed in preclinical testing,” said Tony Fadell, an early investor and Principal at Future Shape LLC. “We have great hope that Vium’s ‘Internet of Mice’ will unlock treatments that have been ignored in favor of blockbuster drugs.”

“We are pleased with the continued support and confidence from our investors,” said Vium President and CEO Wendel Barr. “Over the past four years, Vium has rapidly achieved milestones on its ability to prove-out its platform by validating the science of how it can improve data insights on advancing drugs to clinical trials. Vium already enables five of the top 10 pharma companies as customers.”

Today, leading global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies rely upon Vium to enable previously unavailable longitudinal data such as non-interventional 24-hour diurnal breathing rate and motion metrics. These new analytics and insights, when applied with other data, can have a material impact in increasing the odds of drugs making it through clinical trials. This can potentially save the industry billions of dollars.

As part of the Series B financing, Lux Capital Co-founder & Managing Partner Peter Hebert and Data Collective (DCVC) Co-Founder and Co-Managing Partner Zachary Bogue joined the company’s Board of Directors. “We’re enthusiastic to double down on a company that we believe will transform the pharmaceutical development process,” said Hebert. “Today the entire $100B+ drug discovery industry sits on top of a shaky foundation in preclinical research, dominated by manual observation and discontinuous collection. That will change and Vium will drive a new quantitative, higher-signal and ultimately more effective approach.”

“We continue to strongly believe in Vium’s ability to reduce the cost of pharmaceutical development by deprioritizing compounds that are likely failures in humans and prioritizing those that show promise with much more highly predictive digital data,” said Bogue. “As life science companies continue to enhance their discovery and development infrastructure with information technology, we see Vium’s products as a critical bridge in moving from animals to humans.”

Vium is establishing best-in-class disease models using automated, digital efficacy and health metrics across a variety of therapeutic areas. The company’s Arthritis Index was recently presented at the 2016 American Association of Immunologists annual meeting. Researchers demonstrated that when applied to the standard arthritis-efficacy drug model, the Arthritis Index could be measured without labor-intensive, error-prone human-animal interactions. Soon, Vium will share research in other therapeutic areas with high unmet needs, such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, lymphoma, liver fibrosis, leukemia, phenotyping, and aging.

About Vium, Inc.

Vium is the first company to create a living informatics platform for preclinical in vivo drug research. The Vium Digital Vivarium™, Vium Cloud, and online Research Suite empower scientists to optimize advances in bioengineered research models in ways previously not possible. Vium is fully accredited by AAALAC International and received an unprecedented AAALAC commendation for upholding the ‘3 Rs’, the gold-standard framework for humane animal research. Customers run the spectrum of biotechnology, pharmaceutical and computational drug discovery companies, academia and novel therapeutic labs. Vium is backed by leading investors, including Lux Capital, Data Collective, Dolby Family Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Founders Fund, and Future Shape LLC.Vium is headquartered in San Mateo, California.

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