Why We Invested in Cellbyte

At Pace Ventures, we look for teams quietly rebuilding critical infrastructure in massive, overlooked workflows. Pharma R&D has been transformed by data and automation, commercialization has not. Drug launch pricing, reimbursement, and market access still run on PDFs, PowerPoints, Excel files, and consultants. That’s why we invested in Cellbyte, a company building AI agents for pharmaceutical drug launches, turning one of the industry’s slowest, most manual functions into a fast, data-driven, software-defined system.

The Opportunity: Drug Launches Are Still Analog

Bringing a new drug to market doesn’t end at regulatory approval. For Pricing & Market Access (P&MA) teams, the real work starts afterwards: setting launch prices across countries, preparing HTA and reimbursement dossiers, validating pricing corridors, and anticipating payer objections.

Today, this is still done through manual research, fragmented tools, and expensive consulting. Teams copy-paste from old reports, re-scan HTA decisions, and repeat the same analyses market by market—leading to launch delays, millions in extra spend, lost revenue for every month off the market, and inconsistent decisions across geographies.

AI budgets in pharma are exploding, but almost all the focus has gone to discovery, not commercialization. The launch layer is still waiting for its infrastructure company.

Cellbyte’s core insight is simple: pharma’s launch bottleneck isn’t just a data problem—it’s a workflow problem. The world doesn’t need another static database. It needs AI agents that can actually do the work: research, reason, draft, and validate on top of a structured, verifiable data layer.

Cellbyte’s Solution: AI Agents on a Verifiable Data Layer

Cellbyte builds AI agents purpose-built for Pricing & Market Access teams. Instead of digging through multiple tools, documents, and consultant reports, a team member can ask Cellbyte:

“What price corridor is realistic for our new oncology drug in Germany, France, and Spain?”

“Show me comparable HTA decisions for TNF inhibitors and their key payer arguments.”

“Draft the value narrative and evidence table for our German G-BA submission, with links to precedent decisions.”

Cellbyte’s platform does three things exceptionally well:

1) Structured Data Layer

• integrating regulatory, pricing, HTA, and payer data across multiple countries into a consistent schema

• every insight is source-linked back to the original document, enabling auditability and trust.

2) AI Agents for Launch Workflows

• agents that can research, compare, and reason across markets

• automate pricing validation, HTA dossier drafting, and launch readiness checks

• designed for regulated environments where outputs must be explainable and defensible

3) Workflow-First UX

• natural language interface: ask questions as you would to a senior consultant

• self-serve analytics: no more custom Excel models for every question

• “Chat with documents”: extract key insights from long HTA and payer PDFs in seconds

What used to take teams days or weeks of manual effort now happens in minutes, with a full audit trail and consistent methodology.

Why Now: AI Maturity Meets Pharma Pressure

Three shifts make this the right moment for Cellbyte:

1. Enterprise-ready AI: LLMs, retrieval, and agentic systems have matured to the point where they can support compliance-heavy workflows, provided they’re grounded in a reliable data layer.

2. Post-COVID cost and speed pressure: Pharma is under intense pressure to launch faster, cut consulting spend, and standardize global practices. Commercial and market access teams are being told to “do more with less”, and they need real infrastructure, not another slide deck.

3. Digital transformation moving into commercial: After years of focus on R&D and manufacturing, digital budgets are finally flowing into commercial operations, analytics, and market access.

Cellbyte sits exactly at this intersection: AI-native, workflow-native, and built from day one for regulated pharma environments.

The Team: Domain + AI + Company-Building

We’re especially excited about Cellbyte because of the founding team’s blend of deep domain expertise, technical execution, and prior founder experience.

Felix Steinbrenner (Co-CEO & Co-Founder)

A repeat founder with experience scaling YC-backed enterprise SaaS and closing multi-million–dollar ACV deals. Felix brings the company-building, sales, and operational discipline needed to sell into large, complex organizations.

Daniel Vidal Moreira (Co-CEO & Co-Founder)

Daniel spent six years at Simon-Kucher, one of the leading global consultancies for pharma pricing and market access. He has personally designed and executed the very workflows Cellbyte is now automating, pricing corridors, HTA strategies, and payer negotiations. That consulting logic is being turned into software.

Samuel Moreira (CTO & Co-Founder)

Samuel brings strong ML and systems engineering experience from Celonis and Amazon, where he built complex enterprise AI systems and data products. He leads the design of Cellbyte’s data and reasoning layers, ensuring the platform meets the reliability and performance bar expected in pharma.

This combination, lived experience of the workflows, serious engineering, and proven execution, is exactly what we look for in a company aiming to define a new category.

Why It Matters: Faster Launches, Better Access, Less Waste

Cellbyte isn’t just about making pharma teams more efficient:

1. Getting therapies to patients faster by reducing launch delays

2. Freeing budgets from repeating the same consulting work so they can be reinvested in evidence generation and access

3. Raising the standard of decision-making by grounding every pricing and access decision in a transparent, comparable, global evidence base

If Cellbyte succeeds, “How do we price and launch this drug globally?” will no longer be answered by a patchwork of slides and one-off reports, but by a living, intelligent system embedded into how pharma operates.

We’re thrilled to contribute to the $2.75m seed round led by Frontline Ventures to partner with Felix, Daniel, Samuel, and the Cellbyte team as they build what we believe can become the default commercialization layer for global drug launches.