Company
Cura is building virtual organs, computational models of human biology aimed first at drug development. The field still makes animals sick to develop cures for humans, and more than 90% of the drugs that work in those animals fail once they reach people. A single drug takes over a decade and billions of dollars to be approved. AI has accelerated one piece of this by generating millions of candidate molecules, but producing candidates is a small part of the constraint. No biotech can afford to test and develop them all. Cura takes those candidates and simulates how they are likely to behave across human organ functions, from safety to efficacy pathways, so companies advance only the ones worth testing. We build on the best available AI models and biological datasets and fill the gaps with human-relevant data we generate from human-based biological systems. As the models improve, they open the way to more drugs for more patient subpopulations, and we are working through the FDA to qualify them as drug development tools. The founders are industry veterans. Taci Pereira is a Harvard bioengineer who exited a bioprinting startup and then raised $25M to 3D print human organs, partnering with the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Her cofounder, still in stealth, is a unicorn founder with a Harvard background who has been doing AI research for over a decade. Cura was incorporated on April 1, 2026, has already closed its first biotech customer, and raised a pre-seed from angels including Jorge Paulo Lemann, Andy Beck (founder of PathAI, acquired by Roche for $1.05B), Tony James (former President of Blackstone), Henrique Vaz (cofounder of Enter), and Latitud Ventures.