Cellply is a Bologna-based biotechnology company that has spent over a decade building tools that let researchers see something that used to be nearly impossible to observe directly: how individual immune cells behave as they’re engineered into new therapies.

Cellply develops analytical technologies designed to improve how researchers and biopharmaceutical companies study immune cells during the development of immunotherapies and cell-based treatments. These therapies, often referred to as advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs), require highly precise quality control due to their biological complexity and variability.

Thousands of cellular conversations, watched at once

Cellply’s flagship platform, VivaCyte®, is a fully automated system used for the discovery, process development, and functional testing of cell therapies.

VivaCyte uses a patented CC-Array® chip, which is a microfluidic device with thousands of microscopic structures. Inside each one, a single live immune cell can interact with a tumour cell, all happening simultaneously across the whole chip. AI-powered image analysis then reads these interactions automatically.

Cellply’s stated ambition looks beyond research and development. While the company currently concentrates on advancing cell therapy R&D, its longer-term goal is to reduce the cost and complexity of batch release and potency assays used in quality control for these therapies, work that currently slows the path from laboratory to patient.

The people behind Cellply's growth

Cellply’s current leadership pairs a founder who built the company from the ground up with an executive who has already taken a life-sciences manufacturer through a major acquisition.

Alessia Zanelli serves as President and CEO. Before joining Cellply, she led Comecer Spa, a company commercialising automated solutions for pharmaceutical manufacturing, including advanced therapy medicinal products.

Under her leadership, Comecer Spa grew to more than 300 employees and was acquired by ATS Automation Tooling Systems in 2018, giving Zanelli first-hand experience of scaling a high-tech ATMP business to a successful exit.

Massimo Bocchi co-founded Cellply in 2013, drawing on a research background in microelectronics and microsystems for life-science applications. He now serves as Chief Operating Officer and continues to guide the company’s day-to-day operations.

A bottleneck slowing down cell therapy development

Cellply’s challenge is a gap in how immune cells have traditionally been studied. Conventional methods often can’t assess immune cell function with enough resolution or scale, especially for therapies built on highly variable biological material.

As regulatory standards for advanced therapy medicinal products grow stricter, batch release and potency testing remain a real bottleneck slowing adoption.

Cellply’s answer is single-cell analysis technology built to close that gap. Its latest funding round is going toward automated testing solutions that sharpen the precision of cell potency assessment while streamlining batch release for ATMP quality control.

A decade of building toward VivaCyte

Cellply’s growth shows a clear path from lab-based idea to internationally recognised platform.

It closed its first seed round a year after its founding in 2013. Early institutional backing came from investors including Italian Angels for Growth, LIFTT and Indaco, building toward more than €11 million raised through equity and grants by 2023.

In January 2024, Cellply launched its flagship platform, VivaCyte, at Advanced Therapies Week in Miami. The launch marked the culmination of years of work combining the patented CC-Array chip with AI-powered image analysis into a single, automated system.

VivaCyte’s data has since featured in a peer-reviewed publication in Nature Biotechnology, lending scientific credibility to the platform’s approach to characterising immune cells.

Commercial momentum followed. Cellply entered a strategic partnership with Eurofins Biopharma Product Testing Italy, giving cell and gene therapy developers access to the VivaCyte platform’s single-cell characterisation capabilities.

Most recently, in May 2026, Cellply secured €7.15 million in funding led by ENEA Tech and Biomedical, with participation from CDP Venture Capital, marking the largest financing round in the company’s history. The capital is earmarked for international expansion and further development of automated quality control tools for advanced therapies.

Joining Europe's most selective deep tech network

In October 2024, Cellply was selected as one of 72 new companies to join the EIC Scaling Club, announced at the Scale 100 Forum in Athens. It was one of just three Italian companies chosen that year, alongside Energy Dome and Caracol, and was recognised for its work developing advanced analytical equipment to help discover, develop and quality-assure cancer cell therapies and immunotherapies.

Candidates were nominated by investors, mentors, agencies and industry experts, then reviewed by a jury that looks for strong management, innovative technology, a credible market strategy and the potential for scalable impact.

For Cellply, membership places it inside a community of more than 120 European deep tech scale-ups that have collectively raised over €3.4 billion, backed by a network of 400 club members offering fundraising support, leadership mentoring, corporate matchmaking and recruitment help.

The timing lines up closely with where Cellply is headed next. The company has said it wants to accelerate VivaCyte’s international expansion and build out new automated quality control tools for advanced therapies, and both goals sit squarely in the kind of scaling support the Club exists to provide.

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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