Lund-based deeptech startup Cytely has raised €3 million in a round led by Ugly Duckling Ventures, with participation from existing investor Icebreaker.vc, to expand access to its smart-microscopy platform. Cytely turns ordinary microscopes into real-time data engines, eliminating manual bottlenecks and allowing labs to generate statistically powered results in minutes instead of months. Already adopted at Lund University and other leading research institutions worldwide, the platform helps scientists quantify complex cellular phenomena — from viral latency to cancer research — with unprecedented speed and accuracy.
The fresh funding will be used to enhance Cytely’s intelligent acquisition tools, broaden compatibility with microscope brands, and develop one-click quantitative workflows that make data-centric discovery accessible to every lab. The company’s broader goal is to build a global discovery network where researchers can share validated methods, re-analyze datasets, and accelerate breakthroughs in human biology and disease prevention.
Cytely develops data-centric tools for biological research. Its platform transforms conventional microscopes into quantitative analysis systems, enabling scientists to collect and interpret cellular data in real time. By automating image acquisition and standardizing analysis, Cytely helps research teams reduce manual workload and improve statistical reliability across experiments. The company’s technology is used in academic and commercial labs working on areas such as virology, oncology, and metabolic diseases, with the aim of making advanced microscopy more accessible and efficient for the global research community.
“Cytely’s software is a democratizing force in science. It decouples world‑class discovery from world‑class funding, empowering any researcher with a microscope to tackle the biggest challenges in human health. All microscopy will become ‘smart microscopy’; Cytely is turning the ‘wild west’ of possibility into a powerful, accessible platform that will accelerate discovery for researchers everywhere,” said Dr. Vinay Swaminathan, Head of the Laboratory of Cell & Molecular Mechanobiology at Lund University.
For centuries, microscopy workflows revolved around pictures. Researchers can spend weeks manually analyzing hundreds of cells, often ending with insufficient data for statistical confidence. This bottleneck means discoveries that could save lives take decades instead of months.
Cytely addresses this by making data the primary artifact: standardized, quantitative, and replayable. This allows scientists to run rigorous comparisons, see population-level effects, and iterate quickly on evidence, not anecdotes. The platform works with most modern microscopes, turning existing equipment into real-time measurement instruments.
“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.” said Philip Nordenfelt, Cytely co-founder & CEO. “Our goal is to make every experiment analysis-ready from creation, so discoveries stack and science compounds.”
At Lund University, a virology team studying herpesvirus latency struggled with weeks of manual analysis that yielded less than 0.1% of the sample as usable data per experiment, insufficient for statistical confidence.
With Cytely, they were able to process close to 100% of the sample and immediately discovered that while ~80% were transfected, only ~10% were fully infected, revealing a previously hidden cell-line defense response. They redesigned their protocol, switched to a more permissive cell line, and gained the statistical power needed to interrogate latency mechanisms, progressing more in one month than in the previous five years.
“Finally, we feel like this project is actually working… We’re collecting large‑scale data and unraveling mechanisms of viral latency, something that just wasn’t possible before,” said Prof. Alex Evilevitch.
The impact is not limited to virology. At a cancer research facility, Cytely’s platform cut manual analysis effort by three-quarters, freeing up roughly €300,000 per year in researcher time, equivalent to doubling the size of the small team. A nanowire biotech company accelerated R&D throughput by 40%, projected to create approximately $1 million in annual value. And in another example, one lab replaced a €400,000 high-throughput imaging rig with Cytely’s analysis pipeline running on existing microscopes.
The new funding will accelerate Cytely’s mission to accelerate discovery by making smart-microscopy accessible to every lab. It will support development to allow any scientist to run sophisticated quantitative workflows through one-click assays and visual tools, without needing specialized data skills. The funding expands intelligent acquisition capabilities that work with any microscope brand, automatically steering imaging to capture the most relevant biology in real time. It will also allow development of the platform that will enable researchers to share validated methods and re-analyze datasets, building on each other’s work instead of starting from scratch. Looking ahead, the goal is to help build a global discovery engine that integrates knowledge across labs worldwide, moving toward predictive analysis and autonomous scientific discovery.
“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.
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Read the orginal article: https://arcticstartup.com/cytely-raises-e3-million/
