Cancilico, a Dresden-based AI diagnostics startup focused on blood cancer, has raised a €2.5 million seed round to advance its oncology work.
Founded in 2023 as a spin-off of the EKFZ for Digital Health at TU Dresden, University of Technology, and University Hospital Dresden, the company is building AI-driven tools for haematology that aim to automate and improve the accuracy of blood and bone marrow analysis.
Its flagship product, MyeloAID, analyzes bone marrow samples using AI, with the company positioning it as a faster and more accurate approach than today’s workflows. Cancilico says the software can run on standard imaging microscopes or scanners, allowing labs to upgrade capabilities without swapping out existing hardware.
The company also says its underlying data model is based on a large, validated dataset spanning multiple malignancies as well as data from healthy individuals, with partnerships with haematopathology centers feeding additional data into the model.
“We are facing a global shortage of haematologists, yet the complexity of diagnostic cases is rising,” said Markus Badstübner, CEO and co-founder of Cancilico. “Our goal is to democratise access to expert-level diagnostics.”
Badstübner added that the funding will support regulatory navigation in the U.S. and Europe, citing both FDA and CE-IVDR pathways, with a focus on fitting into existing lab setups “without heavy capital expenditure.”
The round was led by a consortium that includes High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), TGFS – Technologiegründerfonds Sachsen, GEDAD GmbH (described as an investment vehicle of the Ehninger family), and ROI Verwaltungsgesellschaft (Roland Oetker).
“We are convinced to invest in a winning team and a superior technology that has already gained commercial traction with its ‘Research Use Only’ data models,” said Dr. Jörg Traub, Principal at HTGF.
