Cytely, a smart microscopy company transforming how scientists generate and interpret biological data, announced new funding led by Ugly Duckling Ventures. The funding will accelerate the global expansion of Cytely’s platform and bring the company closer to its bold mission of curing all preventable diseases.
Cytely’s hardware-agnostic smart-microscopy technology turns traditional microscopes into real-time data engines, eliminating manual bottlenecks that slow down discovery. The system allows laboratories to move from image-based observation to data-driven experimentation, producing statistically valid results in minutes instead of months.
At Lund University, Cytely’s platform has already helped research teams accelerate progress dramatically—achieving in one month what had previously taken five years. By quantifying infection states at single-cell resolution, scientists were able to identify hidden defense mechanisms, redesign protocols, and deepen their understanding of disease pathways. Cytely’s technology is now being applied in studies on cancer, diabetes, and muscle disease, among others.
For decades, traditional microscopy workflows have relied on manual image analysis—an approach that can take weeks and often yields insufficient data for statistically confident results. Cytely’s system replaces static images with standardized, quantitative, and replayable data, allowing scientists to conduct rigorous comparisons, identify population-level effects, and iterate on experiments faster. The platform works with nearly all modern microscopes, instantly converting them into powerful real-time measurement tools.
The platform’s value has been proven across a range of research areas. At a virology lab at Lund University, Cytely enabled a team studying herpesvirus latency to analyze 100% of their sample rather than less than 0.1%, revealing that only 10% of transfected cells were fully infected—a finding that transformed their experimental design and accelerated progress by years. In cancer research, Cytely’s platform has cut manual analysis time by 75%, saving approximately €300,000 annually in researcher labor costs. Meanwhile, a biotech company working with nanowires increased R&D throughput by 40%, creating an estimated $1 million in annual value.
With this latest round of funding, Cytely plans to expand its intelligent acquisition and analysis capabilities to support one-click, quantitative workflows accessible to all researchers—no data-science expertise required. The platform will also evolve to support shared, validated workflows that enable scientists worldwide to re-analyze datasets and build collaboratively on one another’s discoveries.
Louise Lachmann, Partner at Ugly Duckling Ventures, called Cytely’s approach “truly transformative,” emphasizing its potential to democratize discovery and accelerate breakthroughs across global biomedical research.
Cytely’s platform is already in use at research centers spanning Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Singapore, and San Diego, with availability for additional labs and core facilities beginning immediately. Teams can import existing datasets for analysis or enable real-time control on supported microscopes through the company’s platform.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Dr. Vinay Swaminathan, Head of the Laboratory of Cell & Molecular Mechanobiology, Lund University
“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. Our goal is to make every experiment analysis-ready from creation, so discoveries stack and science compounds.”
Philip Nordenfelt, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Cytely
“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.”Prof. Alex Evilevitch, Virology Researcher, Lund University
