ArcaScience, a French AI Healthtech startup setting a new standard for benefit-risk evaluation to make better, safer drugs, has announced a €6 million Seed funding round to support US and UK expansion, launch a patient-facing solution for paediatric brain cancer and skin diseases, recruit a Chief Medical Officer, and accelerate the clinical impact of its AI.
The round was led by The Moon Venture, with participation from Pléiade Venture, Plug&Play Ventures, Bpifrance, and AKKA Technologies.
“It takes 10+ years to bring a drug to market. There is a 90% fail rate and the average cost per drug that makes it to the market is $2.3 billion! Benefit-risk prediction is no longer a nice-to-have, but a prerequisite for building better drugs. This funding round will help us scale our product, and bring real benefit-risk clarity to both the pharma industry and patients,” said Romain Clement, Founder and CEO at ArcaScience.
Founded in 2018, ArcaScience was born out of a personal experience. Founder Romain Clement was diagnosed with a form of brain cancer, and experienced firsthand the healthcare industry’s inefficiencies in designing tailored treatments for individual patients. After his remission, he took it upon himself to address the vast and numerous blind spots in how pharmaceutical companies evaluate the benefit-risk profile of new drugs.
Founded to address this bottleneck in drug development, ArcaScience has worked on development of AI to radically improve benefit-risk assessments for pharmaceuticals & regulators, empowering both clinical teams and patients.
Its proprietary platform combines 24 highly specialised IA models with a single database of 100 billion health data. The company currently counts 8 collaborators and works with institutions such as the Brain Institute of Paris (ICM) and Inserm.
In 2023, ArcaScience accelerated its commercial growth with the addition of two new partners: Julien Dufour, former Head of Sales at Happytal and La Poste Santé, and Jean-François Arbona, a seasoned serial entrepreneur.
“We’re thrilled to be backed by The Moon Venture whose team of Founders turned investors bring unparalleled access to global entrepreneurs and HealthTech networks, and Pléiade Venture, who are known for helping startups scale to profitability and long-term success,” added Clement.
This is ArcaScience’s first institutional funding round and follows a €1.3 million pre-Seed raise with Plug & Play Ventures and angel investors.
The funds will be used to expand operations in the US and UK with a new standard for drugs’ evaluation, launch the company’s first patient-facing solution, with an initial focus on pediatric brain cancer and dermatological diseases as well as for a recruitment of a Chief Medical Officer, to accelerate the translation of ArcaScience’s AI into measurable clinical impact.
The global benefit-risk evaluation market is valued at €11.1 billion annually (Leem, 2023). As AI adoption in healthcare accelerates, experts predict that 80% of pharmaceutical companies will rely on AI solutions for benefit-risk evaluation by 2026. ArcaScience is already seeing traction from this shift, working with global pharma leaders and research institutions.
“ArcaScience is solving a critical need in the pharmaceutical industry with a groundbreaking technological approach,” said the team at The Moon Venture. “We’ve seen remarkable market traction to date, and we believe they are ideally positioned to have a major impact in the pharma and patient care industries. This investment aligns with our strategy of supporting companies that are transforming entire industries through AI.”
ArcaScience already counts 10 pharma clients including Sanofi, AstraZeneca, GSK, Takeda, ICON, and the Paris Brain Institute. The company is also a member of a newly formed pan-european consortium looking at ways to combat pediatric brain cancer with AI.
The consortium was created by Sanofi and Imagine for Margo and also includes the Paris Brain Institute, the Institut Gustave Roussy, the Medical University of Vienna, as well as major pharma companies such as AstraZeneca, Roche, and Merck.
ArcaScience’s platform has reportedly been used by over 70,000 patients in the area of chronic skin diseases and is being adopted by clinical operations and pharmacovigilance leaders to derisk clinical trials and optimise drug development.
Notably, ArcaScience was selected by the French government during the COVID-19 crisis to structure and deliver the complete corpus of scientific knowledge on the virus.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/09/paris-based-arcascience-raises-e6-million-to-transform-drug-development-with-ai-powered-benefit-risk-intelligence/
