Leading Okeiro's series A: Extending healthier lives for chronic disease patients

A New Era in Organ Transplantation

For transplant patients today, the stakes are life-changing: receiving a kidney transplant offers vastly superior quality of life and survival compared to dialysis. Yet, the harsh reality remains that there simply aren’t enough organs to meet the ever-growing demand. In France alone, nearly 20,000 patients wait anxiously for a kidney transplant, with numbers steadily increasing. Even those fortunate enough to receive a transplant face significant risks, with one in six losing their graft within five years, and one in two within ten years.

Headlines once confined to science fiction are now real: a pig kidney successfully transplanted into a human, French surgeons performing six simultaneous kidney transplants, and Harvard researchers genetically modifying animal organs to make xenotransplantation possible. These groundbreaking developments envision a future where engineered organs might one day be available on demand. Yet, while this exciting future captures headlines, today's transplant patients and physicians continue to grapple with urgent, unsolved challenges: organ shortages, graft rejection, insufficient long-term survival, and fragmented patient care. This pressing need for better solutions remains as vital as ever.

This is where Okeiro steps in.

The Urgent Need for Innovation in Kidney Transplantation

By 2040, Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) will rank 5th in global mortality, and is even more prevalent in the US with 15% of the population affected by some form of CKD vs 10% for the rest of the world. Advanced-stage patients depend solely on dialysis or kidney transplantation. Despite the evident benefits of transplantation, challenges persist. When rejection occurs, patients either undergo another transplant, if lucky, or return to dialysis—a demanding and costly treatment, three times more expensive than transplantation for healthcare systems. The economic and human toll is immense.

Picture a patient strapped to a dialysis machine for hours every week, desperately hoping for a kidney that might not last. That’s the reality Okeiro is committed to changing.

Okeiro’s Groundbreaking Solution

Okeiro is pioneering precision medicine through its advanced clinical decision support platform, transforming care for transplant patients by leveraging artificial intelligence to prevent organ failure across critical organs, including kidneys, lungs, heart, and liver. At the core of Okeiro’s platform lies the groundbreaking iBox®, a clinically validated predictive algorithm developed by the Paris Transplant Group team led by Professor Alexandre Loupy. iBox has been developed from over 85 clinical parameters and reduced to 8 causal clinical, biological immunological and histological parameters both pre- and post-transplantation, to precisely forecast kidney graft survival up to 10 years after transplantation, providing unprecedented accuracy in patient monitoring and treatment.

The integration of iBox within Okeiro’s platform enables hospitals and healthcare providers to centralize patient care and seamlessly implement remote monitoring and predictive diagnostics. Clinicians receive real-time alerts and insights to swiftly detect complications, enabling informed clinical decisions that directly enhance patient outcomes. Patients themselves gain access to intuitive, secure apps for remote data submission, therapeutic education, and streamlined communication with their care teams, substantially improving their daily quality of life.

This is not theoretical—Okeiro’s technology is backed by rigorous validation. iBox has achieved international validation across cohorts encompassing more than 20,000 patients, and secured landmark regulatory approvals from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in December 2022 and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2024. These milestones underscore both the clinical relevance and transformative potential of Okeiro’s platform.

Beyond direct patient care, Okeiro provides pharmaceutical companies with an advanced, AI-driven platform for drug development and clinical research. By leveraging iBox’s predictive capabilities combined with robust datasets and sophisticated analytics, Okeiro accelerates clinical trial processes. Pharmaceutical companies can rapidly and reliably evaluate the efficacy of new treatments, reduce research costs, and streamline trials through innovative methodologies like digital twins and synthetic control arms.

A Turning Point for Transplant Drug Development

Historically, pharmaceutical companies have been reluctant to invest in new immunosuppressive therapies due to costly, lengthy, and complex clinical trials. Demonstrating treatment efficacy traditionally required randomized controlled trials spanning 5-10 years, negatively impacting profitability and patent viability, and thus stalling innovation in transplantation medicine.

Okeiro’s integration of iBox disrupts this stagnation by providing precise, regulatorily approved predictive analytics, significantly accelerating drug development. Pharmaceutical companies now have a robust and efficient means to swiftly evaluate therapeutic outcomes, reigniting investment interest in transplantation medicine.

This renewed enthusiasm aligns with broader transplantation advancements, including xenotransplantation. Through Okeiro’s platform, pharmaceutical companies can model clinical outcomes with exceptional precision, effectively manage risks, and expedite the delivery of innovative, life-saving treatments to the patients who urgently need them.

Our Journey with Okeiro

Our relationship with Okeiro began with a masterful cold email from co-founder and CEO Pierrick Arnal. What immediately stood out was Okeiro’s compelling scientific moat, the exceptional resilience of the team, and the urgency of the global problem they were addressing.

Crucially, Pierrick highlighted the massive US market opportunity, central to our investment thesis, reinforced by Okeiro’s strategic partnership with CareDx, a leader in transplant care.

Pierrick’s blend of scientific expertise and entrepreneurial experience—including scaling healthcare ventures across the U.S. and leading significant funding rounds—cemented our confidence in his leadership. With a PhD in Biology and Physiology, Pierrick previously conducted impactful research at Stanford Medicine, and notably successfully establishing a French medtech’s presence across 220 US healthcare centers from scratch.

Our conviction deepened further upon meeting advisors such as Professor Alexandre Loupy at INSERM, France’s prestigious biomedical research institution. Alexandre is an internationally renowned nephrologist with over 450 publications—including numerous lead-author studies in prestigious journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and JAMA. (For a glimpse of Alex’s remarkable academic impact, check out his Google Scholar profile—the citation count alone speaks volumes!). We are incredibly fortunate in France to benefit from a vibrant ecosystem where institutions like INSERM foster the translation of cutting-edge science into industrial and commercial successes.

We're super happy to be leading this $10M Series A alongside our friends at Alven and Forepont, helping Okeiro build a global leader in AI-driven care for chronic diseases.