Cytely, a pioneering biotech company, has raised € 3 million in a funding round led by Danish Ugly Duckling Ventures. The investment will fuel the international expansion of Cytely’s AI-driven microscopy platform, which automates cell analysis and dramatically speeds up biomedical research. Cytely has previously raised pre-seed funding from Icebreaker.vc.
Cytely’s smart microscopy platform is designed to be hardware-agnostic, turning traditional microscopes into real-time data engines. By eliminating manual bottlenecks, the platform enables laboratories to obtain statistically robust results in minutes, a process that previously took months.
“Their vision is truly transformative. We’re thrilled to lead this round and support the mission to make smart, data‑centric microscopy accessible to every lab,”
said Louise Lachmann, Partner at Ugly Duckling Ventures.
Traditional microscopy relies on image-based analysis, which is slow and yields limited data. Cytely’s platform changes this by making data the primary output, delivering standardized, quantitative, and reproducible results. This shift allows researchers to make faster, more reliable decisions, accelerating the pace of discovery.
“Scientists have been constrained by workflows built for images, not data. Cytely transforms any microscope into a real-time measurement instrument, closing the loop from acquisition to decision on an experiment-day timescale rather than a grant cycle,”
says Philip Nordenfelt, Cytely co-founder & CEO
With the new funding, Cytely will further develop its AI platform to make it even more intuitive, enable collaboration between researchers, and expand operations in the U.S. and Asia. The long-term goal is to build a global discovery system that helps scientists make breakthroughs faster and eventually predict outcomes and autonomously drive parts of the research process.
