Axiom Bio
Screens compounds on live human liver cells at scale and trains AI models on the images to predict drug toxicity before human trials.
Money and evidence
Latest round, Round (unnamed), 2025-04-28: the record then held no research entry for the company. The first research entry is dated 2026-02-06; the highest level so far is 3 (Checked against existing evidence).
Rounds and research, on one timeline
- 2026-03-27Research
Level 3 · Checked against existing evidence
Imaging liver cells picks up compound activity at lower doses than standard toxicity assays, but does not predict cell-free assays
Axiom Bio sells liver-toxicity prediction from exactly this kind of imaging, and this is the public paper behind it: the images carry what happens inside a cell and nothing about a protein in a tube, so what the method can replace is bounded by biology, not by model size. A pretrained vision transformer and a convolutional network scored about the same as hand-engineered image features, so the limit here is the assay, not the architecture. The cells are one pooled five-donor hepatocyte lot, so donor variation is untested, and the ToxCast comparison uses other labs' assay designs.
- 2026-02-06Research
Level 2 · Computed
Counting the cells a compound leaves alive predicts popular bioactivity benchmarks about as well as Cell Painting models, because many of their assays measure cell death
Cell images and gene-expression profiles are offered to drug discovery as extra information about what a compound does. These benchmarks could not show it, because a compound that kills cells looks active in many of their assays. The paper's fix is a cell-count baseline and dropping viability assays; on a cleaned set of 24 protein-target assays, Cell Painting models reached a balanced accuracy of 0.67 against 0.52 for cell count.
- 2025-04-28Round (unnamed)Round
$8M
For: grow the toxicity dataset and models
Data generationModels and platform
Amplify's post says it invested again alongside Dimension Capital in this $8M financing late in 2024; the post, published 2025-04-28, is the first announcement and names no lead. Zetta Venture Partners and the angels it lists are not tied to either round.
- 2025-04-28date disclosed · closed 2023SeedRound
$7M
Not stated
A $7M seed Amplify says it led in 2023; first disclosed in its 2025-04-28 post, which gives no date or other investors for it.
Research entries are the timeline's graded entries that name this company. A level grades one claim, not the company, and a blank can mean the record has not caught up rather than that nothing was published.
On the investors' own sites
Investors that name this company on their own site, in a portfolio or their own announcement. A ✓ in a round marks the same investor.
- Amplify Partnersamplifypartners.com ↗
Other backers, round not stated
Named as backers in investor databases, reports or the investors' own posts; no source read places them in a round on the record.
Zetta Venture PartnersJeff DeanLaksh AithaniBarry McCardelAlec NielsenAri MorcosStef van GriekenElliot Hershberg
Its investors also backed
Other companies on this page whose rounds name the same investor.
- DimensionOnyx Bio, Chai Discovery, Enveda, Achira, Helixon (Earendil Labs), Lanyon AI
- Amplify PartnersAchira