Aitiologic raises €6.4M Seed to advance tissue-resolved liquid biopsy and preeclampsia screening

Aitiologic (Vienna) has raised €6.4 million in an oversubscribed Seed round co-led by Heal Capital and Ananda Impact Ventures, with existing investors PUSH VC and LANA Ventures reinvesting. Founded and led by Dr. Andreas E. Posch, the company is developing Aitios, a tissue-resolved liquid biopsy platform that analyses cell-free DNA from a routine blood sample using a combination of genomic, epigenomic, and fragmentomic signals plus AI to determine which tissues the DNA originated from. The technology was co-invented at Siemens Healthineers before being spun out.

The platform's lead clinical program is preeclampsia risk stratification: a test that could identify, from a standard first-trimester blood draw, which pregnancies face elevated risk of preeclampsia — a hypertensive complication affecting 2-8% of pregnancies globally that remains one of the leading causes of maternal and perinatal mortality. The company is currently running a validation study in more than 1,000 pregnancies, conducted in partnership with the Fetal Medicine Foundation.

Dr. Gordon Sanghera CBE FRS — co-founder and former CEO of Oxford Nanopore Technologies — has joined Aitiologic's advisory board alongside this round, acting as both investor and adviser.

What tissue-resolved liquid biopsy means

Liquid biopsy — extracting diagnostic information from cell-free DNA circulating in blood — has become a standard technique in oncology. Its application to obstetrics and other non-cancer fields is less mature, partly because distinguishing cell-free DNA from different tissues requires more granular analysis than detecting a tumour mutation.

Aitiologic's claim is that its Aitios platform can perform that tissue resolution: using the combination of what the DNA sequence says (genomic), how the DNA is marked (epigenomic), and how the DNA fragments are shaped and distributed (fragmentomic), the AI model can identify not just that abnormal DNA is present but where in the body it originated. In the preeclampsia context, this means assessing placental-origin signals to predict which pregnancies are developing the conditions that precede hypertensive complications.

The clinical gap

Current first-trimester preeclampsia screening — a combination of maternal history, blood pressure, uterine artery Doppler ultrasound, and two or three biochemical markers — achieves sensitivity around 75% for early-onset preeclampsia when performed by trained specialists with the required equipment. A blood-draw-only test that matches or exceeds that performance without requiring ultrasound expertise would expand access significantly, particularly in lower-resource clinical environments.

Posch: "We have moved from a technology hypothesis to published clinical data and now into an ongoing large-scale validation study of our Aitios® platform in more than 1,000 pregnancies."

The investor logic

Heal Capital (Berlin) is a health-focused early-stage fund with a portfolio that spans diagnostics, therapeutics, and digital health — its co-lead here signals confidence in both the science and the commercialisation path. Ananda Impact Ventures backs health and social-impact technology with measurable outcomes; preeclampsia's disproportionate burden in low-and-middle-income countries gives Aitiologic a clear impact thesis alongside its commercial one.

Sanghera's involvement is a meaningful validation signal: he built Oxford Nanopore from spinout to multi-billion-pound public company and understands the specific challenges of commercialising sequencing-adjacent diagnostics. His joining the advisory board alongside this seed round suggests the technology is at a stage where strategic guidance on clinical development and manufacturing scale is becoming the relevant constraint.

The €6.4 million funds the validation study through to a data readout and positions the company for a Series A financing once that readout is available — likely 18-24 months out.