Alithea Bio VivaTech Awards: Winning Double Honors at VivaTech 2026

The intersection of advanced artificial intelligence and clinical oncology has reached a monumental milestone. At Europe’s largest tech and startup event in Paris, the Alithea Bio VivaTech Awards sweep solidified our position as a global leader in precision medicine. Celebrating its landmark 10th anniversary, VivaTech 2026 drew over 200,000 international visitors, 15,000 startups, and thousands of global investors to the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles.

Amidst fierce global competition on Stage One, Freiburg-based Alithea Bio achieved a sensational double victory, walking away with two of the conference’s most competitive accolades. Led by our executive team—CEO Fanny Giannou, CSO Dr. Tim Fugmann, and CFO Hagen Grauer—the team demonstrated how empirical tissue data can turn the vision of personalized cancer vaccines and TCR therapies into an immediate reality.

CEO Fanny Giannou accepting the official Tech for Change Award at VivaTech 2026 in Paris.

The Awards: Tech for Change and Audience Choice

VivaTech’s selection committee focused heavily on the core theme of “AI: Impact, Not Illusion,” seeking out deep-tech innovations that deliver concrete, real-world biological outcomes rather than purely speculative software code. Alithea Bio’s multi-disciplinary platform captured both the professional jury’s consensus and the public’s conviction, securing a dual win:

• 🏆 The Tech for Change Award 2026: Awarded on Stage One in partnership with TechCrunch, recognizing disruptive technologies engineered to solve humanity’s most pressing clinical challenges.
• 🏆 The Audience Award 2026: Driven by overwhelming support from the global tech community, investors, and ecosystem partners who voted Alithea Bio as the most impactful standout startup of the exhibition.

“Winning both the Tech for Change and Audience trophies at the biggest VivaTech in history is an incredible validation of our mission. It proves that the future of precision oncology belongs to machine learning models that are fundamentally anchored in authentic human biology.”
— Fanny Giannou, CEO and Co-Founder

From de:hub Pitch Night to the Global Stage

This major international breakthrough follows a string of successful milestones across the European deep-tech infrastructure. Our strategic ecosystem partner, the de:hub Initiative (supported by the FZI Research Center for Information Technology, CyberForum, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), celebrated the victory by highlighting Alithea Bio’s consistent momentum.

Our team previously demonstrated our disruptive potential at the de:hub Pitch Night in Karlsruhe 2025. These new global honors at VivaTech confirm what regional biotech experts and innovation networks recognized early on: Alithea Bio is delivering the critical infrastructure required to safely scale cellular therapies worldwide.

How HLA-Compass Empowers Precision Oncology

The core engine behind the historic Alithea Bio VivaTech Awards recognition is our flagship Software-as-a-Service solution: HLA-Compass. It represents the world’s largest quantitative database of real-world, mass spectrometry-derived human tissue profiles.

Traditional target discovery is frequently caught in a bottleneck—relying on purely synthetic in-silico models that often cause unforeseen off-target toxicities during clinical-stage validation. HLA-Compass circumvents this roadblock by providing empirical, high-resolution peptide characterizations from genuine healthy and tumor tissue samples.

Key Pillars of the Neozoom and HLA-Compass Framework:

• Unmatched Target Verification: Over 1.4 million unique peptides cataloged to swiftly identify true tumor-specific neoepitopes.
• Exceptional Predictive Velocity: Processing automated re-analysis pipelines against proprietary or public catalogues in under 7 hours.
• Universal and Non-Canonical Scope: Seamlessly mapping complex genomic targets across the 99% population-conserved HLA-E cancer immunotherapy axis and the thousands of microproteins within the Dark Proteome.

Accelerating the Path to Clinical Reality

For early-stage biotech startups, established enterprise biopharmas, and venture capital syndicates, the takeaway from Paris is absolute: predictive software must be cross-referenced with real human tissue data to clear strict regulatory frameworks and de-risk valuable clinical pipelines. With €1.6 million in revenue in 2025, Alithea Bio is a commercially validated platform — not just a research project. We are currently raising €10 million to scale HLA-Compass globally and accelerate partnerships with leading pharmaceutical companies.

We are actively connecting with strategic investors and pharmaceutical leaders who share our conviction that the future of oncology belongs to data-anchored AI — not synthetic guesswork.

We extend our deepest gratitude to the VivaTech startup jury, the de:hub network, our co-development partners, and the global healthtech community for supporting our path to the top. Reports on the official award lists can be reviewed via VivaTech Tech for Change Award 2026 announcement.

Ready to de-risk your preclinical assets using our award-winning data infrastructure? Contact the Alithea Bio team today to schedule an exclusive, 1-on-1 technical consultation or to access a live demo of the HLA-Compass platform.