University of Cambridge
Spinout Investments

AI-Driven Cardiovascular Drug Discovery

Ventures

Cambridge Enterprise has joined a £1.4 million pre-seed investment in CardiaTec, an AI drug target discovery company specialising in cardiovascular disease. The round was led by Laidlaw Scholars Ventures and APEX Ventures and also joined by Crista Galli Ventures and o2h ventures.

Cardiovascular diseases have persisted as the world’s leading cause of death since the 1980s. Despite this, cardiovascular investment and therapeutic innovation are dwarfed in comparison to oncology and neurodegenerative diseases. New technologies are urgently needed to help close the gap.

CardiaTec is developing a target discovery platform leveraging artificial intelligence to make sense of large-scale multiomic cardiovascular data. As opposed to conventional single -omic analysis, CardiaTec’s proprietary platform unravels relationships that stretch across every level of biology—from gene variation, methylation, and expression to their connection to proteomic and metabolomic functions—in order to best understand cardiovascular disease development.

CardioTec was co-founded by Raphael Peralta (CEO), Thelma Zablocki (COO), and Namshik Han (CTO). Peralta and Zablocki are graduates of the University of Cambridge MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise programme. Han is a world-leading academic in AI applications for target and drug discovery. He holds positions at the University of Cambridge at the Milner Therapeutics Institute and the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine.

This raise marks the first investment of Laidlaw Scholars Ventures (LSV), a new venture capital fund established by the Laidlaw Foundation to invest in businesses led by Laidlaw Scholars.

Namshik Han, CTO, CardiaTec:

“Recent advances in AI are generating novel ways to interpret multiomic data. I am excited to lead CardiaTec’s technology strategy to establish a new paradigm for understanding the pathophysiology of cardiovascular diseases.”

Raphael Peralta, CEO, CardiaTec:

“Cardiovascular disease research has been subject to some very positive recent events. We strongly believe, after several decades of stagnation, that investment and innovation in cardiovascular disease is re-emerging, driven not only by unmet need, but also by the opportunities AI brings. CardiaTec finds itself incredibly well placed to help drive innovation forwards within this space, now supported by a great syndicate of investors.”

Niall Santamaria, Chief Investment Officer, Laidlaw Scholars Ventures:

“We are delighted to support this exceptional team on their mission to improve patient outcomes by using AI for good. Despite the prevalence of cardiovascular ailments, there has been significant under-investment. We believe these funds will provide CardiaTec with the opportunity to unearth treatments that make a real difference to patients.”