LUND, SWEDEN — Cytely today announced new funding led by Ugly Duckling Ventures to expand availability of its smart-microscopy platform and accelerate the mission to cure all preventable disease. Cytely’s hardware-agnostic smart‑microscopy platform converts microscopes into real‑time data engines, eliminating manual bottlenecks and giving labs statistically powered results in minutes, not months. At Lund University the solution is integrated into several labs’ workflows and has already helped researchers advance further in one month than in the prior five years by quantifying infection states at single‑cell resolution and redesigning their protocol accordingly. It is also helping labs in the fight against cancer, diabetes and muscle disease, to name a few areas.

“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,” said Dr. Vinay Swaminathan, Head of the Laboratory of Cell & Molecular Mechanobiology at Lund University.

From pictures to data, from bottlenecks to breakthroughs

For centuries, microscopy workflows revolved around pictures. Researchers can spend weeks manually analyzing hundreds of cells, often ending with insufficient data for statistical confidence. This bottleneck means discoveries that could save lives take decades instead of months.

Cytely addresses this by making data the primary artifact: standardized, quantitative, and replayable. This allows scientists to run rigorous comparisons, see population-level effects, and iterate quickly on evidence, not anecdotes. The platform works with most modern microscopes, turning existing equipment into real-time measurement instruments.

“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.” said Philip Nordenfelt, Cytely co-founder & CEO. “Our goal is to make every experiment analysis-ready from creation, so discoveries stack and science compounds.”

Customer proof: weeks, not years

At Lund University, a virology team studying herpesvirus latency struggled with weeks of manual analysis that yielded less than 0.1% of the sample as usable data per experiment, insufficient for statistical confidence.

With Cytely, they were able to process close to 100% of the sample and immediately discovered that while ~80% were transfected, only ~10% were fully infected, revealing a previously hidden cell-line defense response. They redesigned their protocol, switched to a more permissive cell line, and gained the statistical power needed to interrogate latency mechanisms, progressing more in one month than in the previous five years.

“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,” said Prof. Alex Evilevitch.

The impact is not limited to virology. At a cancer research facility, Cytely’s platform cut manual analysis effort by three-quarters, freeing up roughly €300,000 per year in researcher time, equivalent to doubling the size of the small team. A nanowire biotech company accelerated R&D throughput by 40%, projected to create approximately $1 million in annual value. And in another example, one lab replaced a €400,000 high-throughput imaging rig with Cytely’s analysis pipeline running on existing microscopes.

What the new funding enables

The new funding will accelerate Cytely’s mission to accelerate discovery by making smart-microscopy accessible to every lab. It will support development to allow any scientist to run sophisticated quantitative workflows through one-click assays and visual tools, without needing specialized data skills. The funding expands intelligent acquisition capabilities that work with any microscope brand, automatically steering imaging to capture the most relevant biology in real time. It will also allow development of the platform that will enable researchers to share validated methods and re-analyze datasets, building on each other’s work instead of starting from scratch. Looking ahead, the goal is to help build a global discovery engine that integrates knowledge across labs worldwide, moving toward predictive analysis and autonomous scientific discovery.

“Their vision is truly transformative. We’re thrilled to lead this round and support the mission to make smart, data‑centric microscopy accessible to every lab,” said Louise Lachmann, Partner at Ugly Duckling Ventures.

Availability

Cytely is available today for research groups and core facilities, with leading research institutions across the globe from Copenhagen and Amsterdam to Singapore and San Diego already partnering. Teams can import existing datasets for immediate quantification or enable real‑time control on supported microscopes. Request a demo at cytely.io.

About Cytely

Cytely is a deeptech startup focused on accelerating discovery to unlock human biology and cure all preventable disease. The company’s smart-microscopy platform turns images into data, quantifying thousands of cells per run, automating acquisition, and standardizing analysis so researchers can discover and iterate faster. Built with transparent methods and a modern web interface, Cytely powers the shift to data-centric workflows and works with any modern microscope. The team is globally distributed with founders located across the globe, specifically Lund, San Diego and Singapore.