Italian Allelica raises $1.75M and goes international

EIT Health-accelerated start-up – Allelica, has just secured $1.75 M funding from seed financing round led by Valor Ventures, Sternberg Health, Pi Campus, as well as other strategic business angels. Allelica thus started a new chapter as an international start-up journey.

This is another milestone in the Allelica’s hi-way to success. The Italian team, who develops algorithms to predict the risk of diseases based on genomics data, was firstly recognised in one of the EIT Health acceleration programme in 2019. After winning €50 000, they hit the second round and in 2020 were recognised for their genomic software to identify people who will develop the highest severity of COVID-19 clinical manifestation. It helped them to carry out clinical validations and develop their strategy and business model. Meantime they entered a partnership with one of the top global pharmaceutical companies, Merck.

“Allelica came into our network 2 years ago looking for support to validate their coronary artery disease model. From there they have been growing their company at a rapid pace and we couldn’t be prouder to keep having them in our EIT Health network and supporting them in their journey to bring PRS into preventive medicine” – says Inés Matias, Business Creation Manager, EIT Health InnoStars.

Allelica focuses on reducing coronary artery disease incidence using genomic and digital technologies to personalize prevention strategies and it specialises in building fast, efficient and scalable solutions to implement clinically accessible polygenic risk scores (PRSs). Its technology combines world-class datasets with the most advanced algorithms to build PRSs with the highest predictive power for estimating disease risk.

Allelica’s journey

After acceleration with EIT Health, Allelica’s journey resulted in a successful partnership with Merck and they just received an additional $1.75 million seed financing round led by Valor Ventures, Sternberg Health, Pi Campus, as well as strategic business angels who also participated in the round. As part of the transaction, Valor Ventures General Partner Gary Peat has joined the Allelica Board of Directors and start-up has relocated its headquarters to New York City. This financial support will be used to advance clinical integration of Allelica’s PRS software into healthcare systems in the United States.