Context:
- Based in Munich, Germany, Virtonomy.io is a med tech start-up that creates digital replicas of patients to simulate how medical devices will perform. Its cloud-based platform digitizes the planning and execution of clinical trials for medical devices, using extensive imaging, physiological, and pathological data sets as well as data-driven virtual patients.
- Last week, the company announced that it raised over €5 million in a Series A financing round, relying on its patent portfolio (with one U.S. grant and one European grant so far) to raise the capital.
What’s new: ip fray spoke with Virtonomy’s CEO Dr. Simon J. Sonntag and Bardehle Pagenberg partner Dr. Maximilian Vieweg (co-counsel to the company with Dr. Joachim Mader throughout the entire process, since 2020), to get the behind-the-scenes of their success. While 2025 was a turbulent time for many start-ups, with VC funding dropping by over 70% compared with 2022, Mr. Sonntag emphasized that his start-up’s patents provided the “validated barrier to entry” needed to “de-risk” investment in the company and gain trust.
Patent portfolio
Currently, Virtonomy has a portfolio of two patent families. The first family has one granted U.S. patent:
- U.S. Patent No. 12,469,592 (“System for automatically evaluating virtual patient fitting of medical devices‘)
And one European patent, which will be published at the end of this month.
The family uses a virtual model of the implant and virtual patient models, which are based on real patient image data (e.g., CT or MRI scans). It covers Virtonomy’s v-Patients web-app, which enables users to assess the fit of an uploaded device in a patient cohort based on real clinical data.
The pending patents from the second family cover a collaborative system that allows multiple users to interactively visualize, manipulate, and analyze a shared virtual medical model in real time, with synchronized views and low latency. It is aimed at enabling more efficient medical device development and anatomical analysis by replacing or complementing costly physical trials with immersive, in-silico collaboration.
The investors
Virtonomy’s Series A was led by Companisto and Bayern Kapital, who have supported the start-up since its early stages. Other investors include:
- Accenture Ventures;
- Plug and Play;
- Dieter von Holtzbrinck Ventures (DvH Ventures);
- Honeystone Ventures;
- Pace Ventures;
- Springboard Health Angels; and
- UnternehmerTUM
Valuation
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