Visium secures strategic funding round backed by top-tier investors and unicorn founders
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Visium SA, the leading AI and data partner for enterprises in highly regulated industries, today announced the successful close of its first institutional funding round. The round was co-led by Columbus Venture Partners and Concentric, with participation from a curated syndicate of unicorn founders who have built and scaled some of the most significant AI and technology companies of the last decade. The amount raised is not being disclosed.
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, Visium has grown from a fully bootstrapped company to 100 AI experts across Europe, delivering more than 250 AI and data solutions for global leaders in life sciences, specialty chemicals, and other highly regulated industries. Its clients include Roche, Novartis, and several top 20 pharmaceutical companies, as well as specialty chemicals leaders, including DSM-Firmenich, where Visium collaborated on a frontier AI innovation recognized at the Swiss Digital Economy Awards 2021.
Visium transforms core business functions through an AI-native approach, rethinking workflows from first principles rather than incrementally improving existing processes. This is made possible by an integrated operating model that combines a first-class strategy team, forward-deployed AI engineers and data scientists, and domain experts with deep scientific and technical backgrounds in regulated industries, enabling the company to design and deploy systems that work in real-world environments.
This approach is reinforced by a dual structure that combines consulting with a growing product portfolio. Consulting keeps Visium close to real operational challenges, while its products turn these insights into scalable solutions that deliver measurable impact, rather than one-off implementations.
With this funding, Visium is accelerating its expansion across Europe and the United States, scaling its team and product capabilities to bring its approach to a broader set of global enterprises. Visium has been recognized as one of the Financial Times' Top 100 Fastest-Growing Companies in Europe.
A syndicate of tier-one VCs and category-defining AI & tech founders
Columbus Venture Partners is a Spanish venture capital firm (Valencia, 2016) specialized in biotechnology and life sciences. With over €800 million in assets under management, the firm operates a differentiated investment model and has built a strong track record in developing industrial platforms for advanced therapies. Columbus Venture Partners plays an active role in the creation and growth of more than 80% of its portfolio companies.
Concentric, the London-based “activist venture” fund co-founded by Kjartan Rist and Denis Shafranik, invests in software-driven businesses transforming traditional sectors and is known for its hands-on partnership model with founders.
Participating angel investors include:
- Sam Bourton — Co-founder & CTO of QuantumBlack (acquired by McKinsey), former McKinsey Partner and Global Lead of QuantumBlack Innovation Labs
- Peter Lindholm — Co-founder and former Co-CEO of Frontier Car Group (acquired by Prosus), Chairman and Co-founder of UNARIC
- Thomas Wolf — Co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face
- Peter Sarlin (and syndicate) — Founder of Silo AI (acquired by AMD); now Founder and Chairman of PostScriptum, QuTwo, NestAI.
A defining moment for Visium
Damià Tormo, General Partner, Columbus Venture Partners
Our investment in Visium is driven by the clear thesis that generative AI is redefining operational processes across the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Its ability to design, automate, and optimize complex workflows in an agile manner enables pharma companies, CROs, and R&D teams to significantly reduce timelines and the operational burden associated with drug development. Visium sits at the core of this transformation, removing structural bottlenecks and accelerating data-driven decision-making. These solutions not only enhance efficiency but also have a direct impact on time-to-market and overall sector profitability, fully aligning with our strategy of investing in technologies that catalyze innovation while delivering tangible value.
Denis Shafranik, Co-founder and Partner, Concentric
Great companies are built by great founders, and Alen is one of them. From our very first conversation, his ambition and the outstanding team he has built made the decision easy. What Visium is doing — embedding world-class engineers deep inside complex enterprises to deliver AI that actually works — is a blueprint for how traditional industries will be transformed. That mission sits at the heart of Concentric’s activist approach, and we’re proud to back them for the next chapter.
Alen Arslanagic, CEO and Founder, Visium SA
We bootstrapped Visium for eight years, knowing from the outset that creating transformative and sustainable value with AI would be much harder than most expected, especially across regulated industries. That is why we have built, on one hand, productized and scalable components, and on the other end-to-end capabilities at the intersection of strategic transformation, deep industry expertise, AI, data & platform engineering; bringing all the necessary ingredients to get the value of AI at scale. We believed only this combination could enable the deployment of production-grade AI systems that deliver strategic impact, not just pilots or point solutions that do not move the needle.
This round is not about capital alone. It is about aligning ourselves with investors and operators whose DNA we admire. Columbus brings unmatched experience scaling life sciences ventures, Concentric brings an activist partnership mindset that mirrors how we work with our own clients, and the operators joining us have built some of the most important AI and technology companies of the past decade. We could not be more ready for the next chapter.
A reinforced Board of Directors
Alongside the financing, Visium is announcing four strategic appointments to its Board of Directors:
- Sam Bourton — Co-founder of QuantumBlack, former McKinsey AI Partner
- Javier Fernández — Operating Partner, Columbus Venture Partners; former CEO of Vitro S.A.
- Denis Shafranik — Co-founder and Partner, Concentric
- Urban Lankes — Chairman of biGENIUS and Coople Switzerland
A strengthened Advisory Board
To deepen its scientific and commercial expertise, Visium is also announcing three new appointments to its Advisory Board:
- Jayanth Sridhar — CEO of AveThera GmbH, a Berlin-based biotechnology start-up; previously CEO of Biologics at Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Ltd
- Dr. Christiane Hamacher — former pharma and biotech executive and CEO
- Peter Sarlin — Founder of Silo AI (acquired by AMD); now Founder and Chairman of PostScriptum, QuTwo, NestAI.