Orakl Oncology (“Orakl”), a TechBio company using AI and real patient biology to predict how cancer drugs will perform in clinical trials, today announced a $34 million Series A co-led by Norrsken VC and Singular. The oversubscribed round included new investors InfraVia, Serena, the Patient Autonome Fund managed by Bpifrance, teampact.ventures and Plug and Play, alongside existing investors Verve Ventures, Speedinvest and HCVC. Notable angels include Thomas Wolf, Stan Polu, Jacques Boitreaud and Mostafa El Sayed, bringing Orakl’s total funding to $50 million. Orakl also welcomes advisor Philip Tagari, insitro CSO, who over 24 years at Amgen led 600+ discovery scientists globally and helped bring the first approved KRAS inhibitor (Lumakras®) and DLL3 BiTE® (Imdelltra®) to lung and other cancer patients.

Just over a year after its commercial launch, with 18 of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies in its commercial pipeline, Orakl is already converting its first pharmaceutical engagements into multiyear collaborations.

AI’s next frontier is patient biology

AI can now predict protein structures and design new molecules. Yet one of drug development’s biggest challenges remains unresolved: predicting whether a promising treatment will actually work in patients. AI-designed cancer drugs still stumble in Phase 2, where around 75% of oncology candidates fail 1, largely because the complexity of patient and tumor biology remains poorly understood.

Orakl bridges biological and artificial intelligence by building cohorts of virtual cancer patients: real patients’ tumors, grown in the lab and paired with their medical history and deep biological data. Because these virtual patients can be tested against treatments at scale, Orakl can predict, with causal evidence, how a patient will respond to a drug many years before it reaches the clinic. Pharma companies can then bet on the right drugs, for the right patients, much earlier.

Its predictive engine has demonstrated 90% accuracy in predicting cancer clinical trial outcomes, including predictions that closely anticipated recent pancreatic cancer trial results. Beyond predicting clinical endpoints, the platform can identify which patients are most likely to respond to a treatment and uncover biological mechanisms of sensitivity and resistance. Candidate targets are then validated on Orakl’s proprietary patient-derived models through a lab-in-the-loop approach, building a pipeline of high-conviction targets while continuously improving its AI models, and opening new opportunities for therapeutic target discovery.

Through its international hospital network, Orakl is building a continuously expanding proprietary dataset combining patient biology, clinical information and experimental drug-response data. More than 15 additional cancer centers across Europe, North America and Asia are in contract negotiations, as Orakl aims to build the most comprehensive dataset in oncology.

Scaling from prediction to drug discovery

• New AI models. Orakl will expand the breadth and depth of its dataset and grow its AI research team to extend its predictive and discovery capabilities in cancer biology.
• New cancer types. It will increase data generation fivefold and move beyond colorectal and pancreatic cancers into lung (NSCLC) and gastric cancers.
• New pharma partners. New teams in the US and UK will deploy Orakl’s predictions across more than 10 drug programs.
• New capability: target discovery. It will identify and validate new drug co-targets directly from patient biology and perturbational screens.

Founded in 2023 as a spin-out of Gustave Roussy, Orakl is led by Dr. Fanny Jaulin (CEO), Dr. Gustave Ronteix (CTO) and Dr. Diane-Laure Pagès (COO). Its multidisciplinary team has grown to more than 40 people, 30% of whom hold PhDs.

Dr. Fanny Jaulin, CEO and Co-Founder of Orakl Oncology, said: “For decades, we’ve developed cancer drugs without being able to reliably predict how they will behave in patients until they reach clinical trials. We believe the next breakthrough will come from making tumor and patient biology predictable. This funding will allow us to expand Orakl’s proven capabilities across more cancer types and pharmaceutical programs to impact oncology more widely.”

Agate Freimane, General Partner at Norrsken VC, said: “Too many drugs still enter expensive clinical trials without a clear view of which patients they will work for. Orakl is tackling this bottleneck with a platform combining proprietary biological data, hospital partnerships, lab infrastructure and AI that is exceptionally hard to replicate. We believe Orakl has the potential to become a defining platform for oncology R&D.”

Jeremy Uzan, Co-Founder and General Partner at Singular, said: “Fanny, Gustave and DianeLaure bring together a rare combination of expertise in cancer research, cell biology and computational biology, alongside a clear understanding of what the pharmaceutical industry needs. They’ve translated that expertise into a platform that combines real patient biology, experimental data and AI to predict how cancer drugs will perform in clinical trials. We’re proud to continue backing the team as they scale.“