Resonance Ventures’ Thesis on Photonics
Resonance Ventures invests in Cervole
October 30, 2026
Our investment
We’re proud to be partnering with Eamon and Dylan on their mission to give neurodegeneration research the lipid layer it has been missing. And we’re excited to be investors in their pre-seed round alongside the great team at the Fonds d’investissement Eurêka (an Investissement Québec fund).
This investment aligns with several of Resonance Ventures’ core themes:
- An industry need: Cervolve sits in the neurodegenerative disease therapeutics market, valued at roughly $59B in 2025 and projected to reach $89B by 2031 (7.0% CAGR). Their model will help to derisk therapeutics developments in the space.
- An IP grounded in research: Cervolve’s work is peer-reviewed. In April 2026, the team and collaborators published a lipid-related mechanism in prefrontal cortex astrocytes that contributes to depression risk in Nature Communications. The company has also joined Mila, the Montreal AI institute.
- Early external validation: Cervolve, with Espoir Biosciences and McGill’s Early Drug Discovery Unit, was named one of 20 Discovery Award teams of the Longitude Prize on ALS. The cohort was chosen from nearly 100 applications.
- Team-market fit: Cervolve pairs a lipid neurobiologist with an AI scientist trained in multi-omics integration. That combination is exactly what turning lipid genetics into drug targets requires.
" We're incredibly excited to be partnering with Resonance Ventures as we pave the way for a new generation of neurodegenerative disease therapeutics"
Neurodegeneration is outpacing medicine
Neurological conditions are now the leading cause of ill health and disability worldwide, affecting more than 3 billion people. Dementia alone affected 57 million people in 2021, with nearly 10 million new cases every year. As populations age, those numbers only climb.
Yet the drug pipeline has struggled to keep up. Between 2002 and 2012, 99.6% of Alzheimer’s drug candidates failed in clinical development. Most programs chased the same few targets, and the high failure rate has made investors wary.
The lesson is not that neurodegeneration is untreatable. It is that the field needs a better map of the underlying biology, and new targets to go after.
Why hasn’t lipid biology been put to work yet?
Genetics have been pointing at lipids for years. At least one-third of the risk variants identified in Alzheimer’s genome-wide studies are involved in lipid metabolism, lipid transport or direct lipid binding. The single strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s, APOE ε4, is a variant of a cholesterol and phospholipid transporter.
The hard part has been turning that signal into drug targets. Researchers still describe the mechanisms by which APOE ε4 disrupts lipid balance in brain cells as being not completely understood. Lipids are chemically diverse, hard to measure, and their effects play out through interactions with proteins that shift with age and disease. Few teams, if any, have had both the lipid neurobiology and the machine learning expertise needed to model that complexity at scale.
Closing that gap through a model that understands how brain lipids and proteins interact and how those interactions break down in disease is the opportunity Cervolve was built to capture.
Cervolve is seizing this opportunity
Cervolve is building the models and datasets to map lipid biology across neurodegeneration and turn it into therapeutic insight. Its flagship NeuroLipid Foundation Model is a multimodal model trained to understand how lipids interact with proteins, and how those interactions shift with age and neurodegenerative disease.
The use cases resolve directly some of the industry’s biggest pain points: identifying and de-risking lipid-linked targets early, repurposing existing molecules, and matching patients to the right therapy.
The company was founded by CEO Eamon Fitzgerald, PhD, a neuroscientist with over 12 years of experience in genetics and lipid biology, and CTO Dylan Mann-Krzisnik, PhD, an AI scientist who developed multi-omics and biological data-integration models during his PhD at McGill University and Mila.
We’re excited to back a team that combines deep scientific expertise with a platform built for how drug discovery actually works: targets, molecules and patients. The neurodegeneration field has been waiting for new biology to go after, and we believe Cervolve will help deliver it.
What’s next
Cervolve is already working with diverse partners across the life sciences, researchers and brain banks. With this round, the team will expand the NeuroLipid Foundation Model and its datasets and advance its first target-discovery partnerships. Stay tuned!
About the Fonds d’investissement Eurêka
The Eurêka Investment Fund’s mission is to stimulate the commercialization of innovations emerging from Quebec’s public research ecosystem by investing in the development of new, innovative technology companies. It also aims to attract additional investors to the pre-seed stage of companies whose intellectual property originates from public research in Quebec. The Fund is capitalized by the Government of Quebec through the Quebec Economic Development Fund and is managed and administered by Investissement Québec.
