Deep Piction won't say how much it raised or who invested, but the startup's hiring spree suggests pharmaceutical giants are paying attention to its unconventional imaging platform
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There's something unsettling, yet mesmerizing, about a transparent mouse. Munich-based Deep Piction has built a business around making them—rendering entire rodents see-through to track how experimental drugs move through living tissue at the resolution of individual cells. The biotech startup recently closed a seed round, according to its hiring page, though it's keeping the details close: no amount disclosed, no investor names, no announcement date.
What the company is willing to share is its ambition. Deep Piction wants to fundamentally change how pharmaceutical companies test drug delivery, and maybe—just maybe—reduce the number of animals sacrificed in the process.
When Lab Science Meets Commercial Reality
The technology isn't entirely new. It emerged from the lab of Prof. Dr. Ali Ertürk, who runs the Institute for Intelligent Biotechnologies at Helmholtz Munich while holding a full professorship at LMU Munich. Ertürk spent five years at Genentech early in his career—2009 to 2014, when the big biotech was pushing boundaries in imaging and biologics—and brought that industrial sensibility back to academia.
His breakthrough? A suite of tissue-clearing methods collectively called DISCO. The techniques make biological tissue transparent enough for light-sheet microscopy to peer inside without slicing anything apart. Deep learning algorithms then quantify what they see, generating 3D "digital twins" of drug distribution throughout an animal's body.
It's the kind of science that looks great in journals. And it has: a 2024 Nature Biotechnology paper detailed something called the SCP-Nano pipeline, which mapped nanocarrier distribution across entire mice using doses as low as 0.0005 mg/kg—a tiny fraction of what conventional methods require. Another Nature Biotechnology study the same year introduced wildDISCO, which enables whole-body cellular mapping with standard antibodies.
For that work, Ertürk collected the 2024 Falling Walls Award in Life Sciences, recognition for combining tissue clearing with AI in ways that might actually matter outside the lab.
The Quiet Pivot Toward Drug Discovery
Deep Piction operates out of the Life Science Factory in Neuherberg, just north of Munich, with a team LinkedIn pegs at 2 to 10 employees—a vague range that suggests the company is still small but growing. Dr. Martin Baatz, who previously held leadership roles at Definiens (a name familiar to anyone in digital pathology), runs operations as COO and co-managing director. Dr. Ceren Kimna oversees technology and services.
According to the company's LinkedIn, Deep Piction has "already worked with leading pharmaceutical companies." No names, of course. The platform supposedly handles multiple therapeutic formats: lipid nanoparticles, siRNA, CRISPR gene editors, antibody-drug conjugates, AAV vectors—basically the full menu of modern drug delivery.
But here's where things get interesting. Deep Piction is now hiring for a Senior Director of Drug Discovery with a focus on Long COVID. That's not a service role. That's internal pipeline work. The job posting describes the company as "evolving from world-class imaging platform into an early discovery engine," which is startup-speak for: we're not content being a service provider anymore.
It's a familiar trajectory in biotech—platforms that start by selling picks and shovels eventually want to mine for gold themselves. Whether Deep Piction has the capital and stamina for that shift remains unclear, particularly given its silence on the seed round's size.
The Animal Testing Angle (and Its Complications)
Deep Piction pitches its technology as a path to fewer animal studies by extracting vastly more data from each experiment. The platform can spot trace accumulations—lipid nanoparticles pooling in heart capillaries, for instance—that conventional methods miss, then link those observations to proteomic changes downstream.
There's regulatory tailwind here, at least in theory. The FDA Modernization Act 2.0, signed in December 2022, explicitly permits nonclinical alternatives like in vitro and in silico models where scientifically justified. Animal studies remain the gold standard, yes, but validated alternatives now have statutory legitimacy they once lacked.
Still, the math is complicated. Does imaging one transparent mouse eliminate the need for five traditional studies? Or does pharma simply add transparency imaging on top of existing protocols, increasing per-study costs without reducing animal use? Deep Piction's answer will determine whether its promise of "reducing reliance on animal testing" is marketing or meaningful progress.
What Comes Next
For now, the company is betting pharma will pay for clarity—literally. Drug developers spend billions bringing molecules to market without always understanding where those drugs end up in the body. Off-target accumulation causes side effects. Poor delivery explains why some therapies fail. Deep Piction's transparent mice offer answers, assuming the imaging data translates into better decisions.
The seed round, whatever its size, gives the company runway to prove that thesis. But in an industry where seeing is believing, Deep Piction's reluctance to reveal its funding details feels oddly opaque. Perhaps that's strategic caution in a competitive field. Or perhaps, as with many early-stage biotechs, the round was smaller and more complex than a clean headline would suggest.
Either way, the company is hiring aggressively and talking about internal drug programs. For a startup that won't confirm basic funding facts, that's a telling signal—one that suggests Deep Piction's investors, whoever they are, believe the technology is ready to move beyond pretty pictures of transparent mice and toward something pharmaceutical companies will actually pay for at scale.
