Munich Startup: What is your StartupWhat problem are you solving?
Felix Steinbrenner, Co-Founder & Co-CEO: Cellbyte is a AI platform For Pricing & Market Access (P&MA) in the pharmaceutical industry. Our mission: to accelerate the global market launch of drugs. We enable experts to answer complex questions about clinical data, HTA decisions, pricing references, and regulatory requirements within seconds.
Today, P&MA teams spend countless hours manually researching, comparing, and processing information from highly heterogeneous sources. This is precisely where Cellbyte comes in: We automate these time-consuming steps and deliver precise, evidence-based analyses – faster, more reliably, and significantly more efficiently.
Munich Startup: But that's been around for a long time!
Felix Steinbrenner: Many tools collect or visualize data, but no existing product understands the context, logic, and regulatory dependencies of market access as deeply as our AI-native platform.
What makes Cellbyte special:
- We connect over 100 relevant data sources into a single platform.
- Our AI enables the scalable evaluation of contextual information from more than 30,000 documents.
- The platform was specifically developed for P&MA with in-depth expert knowledge, not as a generic AI tool.
In short: The market had many databases, but no intelligent system that truly understood the complex decision-making processes in market access. We are filling precisely this gap.
Deep industry expertise meets technical know-how
Munich Startup: What is your founding story?
Felix Steinbrenner: The idea for Cellbyte originated from Daniel's work at the life science consultancy Simon-Kucher. There, it became evident on a daily basis how incredibly time-consuming and error-prone it is to compile information from clinical studies, HTA procedures, and price lists.
In parallel, Samuel and I had already built a startup, Glocally, and knew how to design scalable, data-driven processes. When it became clear that a pivot might be necessary at Glocally, the three of us began discussing the matter more intensively. The decisive moment came at the end of 2022 when it became clear how even early AI models like GPT-3.5 could structure complex pharmaceutical documents in seconds. We recognized the enormous potential and, at the same time, the significant unmet need in the market.
This is how Cellbyte came about: the combination of deep industry expertise, technical know-how and the shared desire to rethink market access.
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Felix Steinbrenner: Building an AI platform in a highly regulated environment was challenging from the outset. We had to simultaneously:
- meet the highest data quality requirements,
- Create completely transparent data flows,
- Establish robust compliance processes,
- and gain the trust of an industry that rightly scrutinizes things very critically.
In parallel, the data landscape is extremely heterogeneous: Clinical endpoints, HTA logics, pricing rules, and regulatory documents follow completely different formats and patterns. The technical challenge of unifying all this information natively using AI was significant, but this is precisely where our technological strength arose.
Goal: Global reference platform for market access
Munich Startup: Where would you like to be in one year, where in five years?
Felix Steinbrenner: In one year, we aim to have firmly established Cellbyte as the leading AI platform for pricing and market access in Europe and the USA. We will have further expanded our team, launched more deeply integrated workflows, and embedded our technology even more firmly in the everyday lives of our users.
In five years, we aim to be the global reference platform for market access – a system that harmonizes pharmaceutical, regulatory, and economic data worldwide and enables experts to support complex workflows with AI and execute them with maximum transparency. Our vision is clear: medicines should reach the patients who need them faster.
Munich Startup: How have you experienced Munich as a startup location so far?
Felix Steinbrenner: Munich is an ideal location for us. The proximity to strong pharmaceutical and biotech companies, excellent universities, and a growing tech ecosystem creates exactly the mix we need. Furthermore, we benefit from access to talent in AI and data fields, as well as an active investor scene.
Munich combines international ambition with a strong scientific base – a very good foundation for an AI startup in the healthcare sector.
Munich Startup: Hidden champion or shooting star?
Felix Steinbrenner: A bit of both. We solve an extremely specific, yet globally relevant problem. This makes us a hidden champion in a niche that has a huge impact on healthcare. At the same time, we are currently experiencing strong international growth: increasing demand, a growing customer base, and major technological leaps.
When you put both together, we prefer to describe ourselves as: a hidden champion who is just now becoming a shooting star.
