The resources that matter most are an unwavering belief in what you do, and real clarity about the problem you're solving - Fanny Giannou, Alithea Biotechnology

Fanny Giannou is the Founder and CEO of Alithea Biotechnology, a deep tech company at the forefront of innovative cancer treatment solutions. They aim to revolutionize cancer treatment by advancing T-cell mediated immunotherapies. Since launching in 2019, Alithea’s team grew to 15 people, has its own lab, raised money, completed more than 200 customer projects and won the Tech for Change Award and the Audience Award at VivaTech in Paris in 2026.

Fanny is a Women TechEU 2024 awardee and a HSG/ETH executive MBAX candidate, holds a masters` degree in international economics and has more than 15 years experience in international business development for complicated and highly demanding products. 

Together with her team, she is building an extremely impactful business in a very complex and highly regulated industry. To succeed in this area, she says that what matters most is to truly believe in what you do and clearly understand the problem to be solved.

“Defining that problem clearly is often the hardest part, especially in deep tech, where the technology is mature but the impact still needs to be proven. Once you face the problem honestly and can measure your impact against it, everything else gets easier. That unwavering belief isn't about the technology or the product – it's about the impact and the team. No matter what happens, you need to know why you're doing this, and who you're doing it with.

A founder's day rarely looks like the day before. You're constantly trying things for the first time, with a mindset of 'I've never done this, and I'm confident it will work out.' You also have to let go of perfectionism – one of my mottos is that done is better than perfect. That clashes, at times, with our ambition for scientific excellence. Deadlines and customer needs don't always leave room to run an experiment over and over until it's flawless, and that can be frustrating. But we've learned to turn it into an opportunity: to redefine what 'done' means, the way it's used in product development, and to set pragmatic KPIs for genuinely complex scientific questions.

Early on as a founder, you hear a constant stream of no – from potential customers, from investors, even from people you want to hire. It's hard not to take it personally; it's your baby, and people are telling you it's not good enough yet. The real skill is learning to sort the no’s: which ones mean 'not yet,' and which ones you can simply let pass you by. 

And then surround yourself with the yes’s. There are far fewer of them, and they're rarely loud, but they're the ones that keep you going.”

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Complexity and uncertainty are embedded in such a high-risk / high-reward industry like biotech, and Fanny explains how she is dealing with them, and the important role her co-founder plays.

“I remember being sixteen when a school friend explained Einstein's theory of relativity to me. I understood it, and I was blown away – not by the theory itself, but by the fact that this brilliant mind could grasp something so complex and explain it so that I could actually understand it.

That's my job today. Not to be overwhelmed by complexity, but to listen to the experts on my team, the people I trust, and distill the essence of what they know into something I can explain to others. My job is translating high complexity into simplicity – by listening, questioning, rephrasing, and then trying to explain it myself until it holds up.

Uncertainty is a different kind of challenge. As a CEO, you build your own frameworks for measuring it – regulatory timelines that can shift under you, financing cycles that rarely line up with when a technology is actually ready, the parts of the science we don't yet fully control. You list the parameters and choose your battles: which elements can I control, which ones do I need to get protection against, and which ones are simply outside my zone of influence.

‍My CFO co-founder and I balance each other well here. He's our financial co-founder, he says about himself he is the conservative one, the one who drafts the worst-case and pragmatic scenarios. I'm the 'bring it on, be more ambitious, what's your moonshot' one. Our scenarios usually meet somewhere in the middle, and that's typically where reality ends up.”

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Looking back at their journey until now, Fanny says there have been some critical, pivotal moments that influenced it significantly. One of the clearest ones was leaving her corporate career behind in 2022, taking over full-time as Alithea’s CEO.

“At that point, Alithea Bio had real scientific depth but no scalable commercial engine. I had to decide whether to keep building around a research agenda or rebuild around a commercial one, and refuse to treat those as opposing goals. 

That same year we closed our first deal with a Swiss biotech company and secured a UK-German grant – small, concrete proof that the model worked. 

A year later we signed our first large agreement with a big pharma company, and our revenues came in ahead of what we had planned or expected, which is almost unheard of in the biotech industry.

The second pivotal shift, in 2024, was building our own lab in Berlin and acquiring our own mass spectrometer – moving from depending on external capacity to owning the core of our technology. That's also when HLA-Compass stopped being a data archive and became a decision-making tool for pharma partners like Deck Bio, who use it to de-risk their own drug candidates before committing capital to a clinical trial. 

In each case, the question I asked myself was the same: does this get us closer to something the market will actually fund, or – as I like to call it – is it just for the beauty of science? When those two align, that's when we move.

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When bringing new people on board, she says that they look for experts in their respective fields, but that mindset comes before skills. 

“Working in a start-up is a completely different environment from what most scientists are used to, and it's not for everyone. The people who thrive here can hold scientific rigor and commercial reality in the same hand; they care about their work reaching an actual patient, and they understand that getting there takes financing, partners, and a business model, not just a strong result on the bench.

Our team is built on purpose to reflect that: scientists in immunopeptidomics and mass spectrometry sit next to bioinformatics, business development and communications, all treated as equally core to the mission, not as support functions around 'the real work.' 

‍Internally, we keep it simple – we're teammates, we perform together, and we don't lose the fun in the process. That matters more than people assume; this industry demands a lot over long timelines, and a team that stops enjoying the work doesn't sustain it.

Some of my best thinking on culture actually comes from mentoring students and first-time founders. What I try to model for them isn't a flawless playbook – I don't have one. It's grit, and the willingness to take the leap when everyone around you says not to. I look for exactly that same boldness and curiosity when I bring people onto our team.”

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Alithea is currently closing their next funding round. In the next 5 years, Fanny aims to see it becoming the reference point in immuno-oncology for academia, clinics, pharma and biotech alike.

“HLA-Compass now holds more than 1.4 million unique peptides and over 23 million identifications across 4,580+ samples from healthy tissue, cancer cell lines and tumor. 

I want us to build the tools that make target discovery faster, safer and less expensive. For HLA-Compass to be the reference platform for personalized medicine – the place people check before they commit capital to a clinical trial and where clinicians validate the safest and ideal immunotherapy for their patients.”

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On top of her work as CEO of Alithea, Fanny is also mentoring young female entrepreneurs who want to build in the deeptech area. She says that what she sees is the need for more role models, as well as more successful stories. 

“We need more room for trial and error, without it being read as proof that women shouldn't have gotten the shot in the first place. And we need female-founded companies to actually get funded at the same rate as their male peers, not as an exception worth a headline, but as the norm. Today, female founders in deep tech still raise a fraction of what male founders raise for comparable technology across the EU.

Concretely, that means a culture that celebrates women founders and includes them, rather than treating them as a diversity slide in a pitch deck. It means real pathways to found straight out of university, without founders being made to feel that failure would be catastrophic rather than simply part of building something hard. And it means women being allowed to be good enough on their own terms, without being nudged to step aside or hand over the CEO title just to make a funding round easier to close.

I feel this personally too. People ask me constantly how I manage this with three kids. Honestly, I don't always manage it perfectly – there are missed school assemblies and goodnight stories sent as voice notes because a flight landed late. I don't travel despite my children, I do it because of them. This mission is a promise to the generation they'll grow up in, not an abstraction. Being named a semifinalist for the European Prize for Women Innovators and receiving the Women TechEU Award mattered to me less as personal recognition and more as proof that the model works – and I'd like more women to see that route modelled for them.”

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Finally, we wanted to learn what she thinks would make a major difference in the impact deeptech startup ecosystem in Europe, what founders would need more of to grow and thrive. 

“What would help most is funding: public grants, European funds, and real collaboration between corporates, SMEs and start-ups, instead of each group operating in its own lane. 

We also need proper KPIs for innovation, so success gets measured in a way that reflects how deep tech actually develops, not just how quickly a paper gets published.

Europe needs a genuine start-up culture, and a viable path for academics to thrive outside university walls – to found a company, take the risk, and know that failure won't end their scientific career. Too much brilliant research currently stays inside the lab because there's no real bridge, and no real reward, for taking it out into the market.

Underneath all of this is a bigger question: whether Europe treats deep tech as a research topic, or as something it's willing to actually invest in and defend against markets that fund faster. I'd like to see more cross-border collaboration in that spirit – the kind of grant that brought a UK and a German partner together to make our own model possible – so that promising European deep tech companies don't lose their best people and their best science to whoever writes the bigger check first.”

Thank you, Fanny Giannou!