Personalised medicine has long been hailed as the future of healthcare, but the process of creating these tailored treatments remains slow, labour-intensive, and poorly scaled. For vulnerable groups like children, cancer patients, or those with chronic illnesses, the lack of appropriate medication forms and dosages can be life-threatening. CurifyLabs, a Finnish healthtech startup, aims to automate and modernise this neglected but crucial part of pharmaceutical care.
The company just raised €6.7 million in fresh funding to modernise and automate the manufacturing of compounded medications, making them safer and better suited for patients’ specific, individual needs. This investment round was led by Springvest, a Finnish growth funding platform that connects private investors with promising startups. The round also includes a €1 million deep tech loan from Business Finland. This strategic investment will allow CurifyLabs to ramp up operations, expand its customer base, and commercialise its system to reach high-volume pharmacy networks.
The personalised medicine bottleneck
Despite growing demand for individualised therapies, only 1% of medicines today are tailored through compounding. This process, in which pharmacists manually mix and measure drug ingredients to suit individual patient needs, remains time-consuming, prone to human error, and resource-intensive. It’s also essential as 50% of medicines are not available in child-appropriate forms, and many patients are allergic to commercially available drugs or need different dosages.
Automated compounding systems have been shown to save hospitals more than €250,000 annually by reducing errors and improving efficiency. Preventable adverse drug events related to injectable medications alone cost up to €4.7 billion each year in the US. Despite this, only 30–40% of pharmacies use automated compounding technology, highlighting the vast potential for innovation and adoption.
This manufacturing gap leaves entire patient populations behind, especially children, elderly people, and those with rare diseases. CurifyLabs steps in precisely where big pharma often doesn’t, with an intelligent, efficient system to make personalised medication faster, safer, and scalable.
An origin rooted in academia and experience
The idea behind CurifyLabs emerged from a unique husband-wife partnership. Niklas Sandler, inspired by his mother’s work as a hospital pharmacist, spent years researching pharmaceutical compounding at Åbo Akademi University. His wife, entrepreneur Charlotta Topelius, recognised the commercial potential of automating this process. Combining Niklas’s scientific expertise with Charlotta’s business acumen, the duo co-founded CurifyLabs in 2021 to modernise personalised medicine through automation and innovation.
The team developed a solution that bridges the gap between cutting-edge pharmacy research and real-world application by combining deep scientific knowledge with tech innovation. Their mission: to enable any pharmacist, anywhere, to produce high-quality, personalised medications safely and quickly.
CurifyLabs’ technology has already been validated in a peer-reviewed, Europe-wide study involving 30 pharmacies and hospitals, published in Pharmaceutics. The study confirmed the safety, accuracy, and efficiency of their automated compounding approach, especially for paediatric oral medications.
Pharma printing meets cloud intelligence
At the heart of CurifyLabs’ offering is the Compounding System Solution (CSS), an intelligent, end-to-end platform for automating the creation of non-sterile compounded medicines like liquids, tablets, suppositories, ointments, and more, The system pairs high-quality excipient bases (inactive carrier agents) with active ingredients, either from raw materials or crushed commercial tablets. These are fed into a desktop-sized “Pharma Printer,” which automatically dispenses the precise dosage in the desired form. A cloud-based formulation library guides pharmacists through a validated process, while built-in quality control ensures mass uniformity and eliminates errors.
This combination of hardware, software, and pharma-grade quality control creates a fourfold speed improvement over traditional methods, offering unlimited dosing flexibility and consistent outcomes.
Unlike traditional 3D printing approaches, which are often too slow and cumbersome for real-world pharmacy use, CurifyLabs’ system is designed for speed, versatility, and ease of use. Hospital pharmacists have reported that conventional 3D printers require extensive preparation and cleaning, making them impractical for daily compounding needs — an issue CurifyLabs directly addresses.
RoboPharma: Crisis-ready, decentralised drug production
The company also unveiled RoboPharma, a €5.6 million EU-funded initiative to build an AI and robotics-powered, decentralised pharmaceutical manufacturing platform. RoboPharma will enable precision drug production directly at the point of care, enhancing Europe’s resilience to the healthcare crisis.
The launch of RoboPharma is a major leap toward the future of pharmacy manufacturing. It addresses a major healthcare challenge exposed during recent global crises: the fragility of centralised drug supply chains. Natural disasters, pandemics, and geopolitical shocks have all revealed the need for local, agile drug manufacturing systems.
Led by CurifyLabs and involving six partners across Europe, RoboPharma envisions a future where hospitals and community pharmacies can produce high-precision, customised medications on demand, minimising disruptions and improving patient care resilience.
RoboPharma is a collaboration with six partners across Finland, Sweden, France, Estonia, and Germany, with a total EU contribution of over €3.3 million. This partnership demonstrates both the scalability and the regulatory acceptance of CurifyLabs’ technology across Europe.
What sets CurifyLabs apart?
While many digital health and pharma tech companies focus on AI diagnostics, remote care, or clinical data, CurifyLabs tackles the last-mile problem of medicine delivery, including how to ensure each patient gets the exact medication they need, and in the form they can safely use.
Unlike other solutions that digitise pharmacy records or telehealth platforms, the company combines physical robotics, chemical formulation expertise, and cloud software to produce medicine directly in pharmacies and hospitals. Its desktop-friendly Pharma Printer democratises access to precision compounding, while its formulation library ensures that every batch adheres to pharmaceutical-grade safety and quality standards.
CurifyLabs’ system is already being used by leading European hospital groups, such as Helios Klinikum Erfurt in Germany. Pharmacy teams there report increased efficiency, improved compliance, and enhanced patient safety, especially for paediatric and elderly patients who require custom formulations.
CurifyLabs’ impact is already being felt in Europe and the US, with its systems used in real-world pharmacy settings. With global expansion on the horizon and a booming €15 billion compounding market growing at 5.5% CAGR, the company is well-timed to meet a rising wave of demand.
The largest segment of the compounding market is pain management, accounting for over 32% of all compounded prescriptions, followed by hormone replacement, dermatology, and paediatrics. Compounded medications are often the only way to ensure safe, effective, and palatable treatments for children, especially for those with allergies or sensory processing disorders.
CurifyLabs also ensures regulatory compliance by developing GMP-manufactured pharmaceutical inks and comprehensive quality dossiers for each printable API combination, aligning with evolving FDA and EMA standards for compounded medications.
“The current approach to manufacturing compounded medications is outdated and poorly optimised, failing both pharmacies and the patients they serve. Even with highly trained pharmacists and modern equipment, the process remains unnecessarily labor-intensive, prone to human error, and inconsistent in quality. This can mean that patients with serious conditions may not receive accurate dosages tailored to critical factors like age, weight, and disease severity. The consequences are real: a 9-month-old baby with cancer, for example, cannot swallow standard tablets and requires a carefully customised formulation. It’s time to work together and modernise how we deliver personalised medicine – because every patient deserves treatment that truly fits their needs,” said Charlotta Topelius, CEO and Co-founder of CurifyLabs.
“CurifyLabs addresses critical inefficiencies in pharmaceutical compounding while significantly improving medication safety and efficacy for vulnerable patients, like children. We’re seeing rapid growth of the global compounding market, which presents an exceptional opportunity for new solutions that have the potential to be ten times better than the existing ways to solve the same challenges,” added Aki Soudunsaari, CEO of Springvest Plc.
As the industry moves toward a future of point-of-care, on-demand pharmaceutical manufacturing, CurifyLabs stands at the forefront of a transformation that could make truly personalised medicine accessible to millions more patients worldwide, bringing pharmacy science full circle, but with the power of advanced automation, data, and global connectivity.
