NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Helsinki, Finland-based Plexpress said today that it has raised up to $2.3 million in funding to expand sales of its Transcript Analysis with the Aid of Affinity Capture, or TRAC, platform for high-content gene expression analysis.
Four existing investors and one new investor have invested $1.4 million in the company and have committed an additional $900,000 should Plexpress reach certain milestones.
Plexpress CEO Jari Rautio, vice president of R&D, told GenomeWeb Daily News sister publication BioArray News that since the firm launched TRAC in 2009, it has offered it as a service through its labs in Helsinki. Now the firm plans to expand its market by selling the platform to contract research organizations that can offer TRAC services to their clients.
"This funding will enable Plexpress to pursue high-value market opportunities, such as companion diagnostics and ADMET," Rautio said in a statement. "TRAC provides significant benefits over existing technologies, such as qPCR and microarrays, which do not offer the throughput or multiplexing that many genomics researchers require."
Investors in both rounds include Conor Technology Fund I, based in Espoo, Finland; Veraventure, of Kuopio, Finland; the Helsinki University Fund; and VTT Technical Research Center of Turku, Finland. The new investor in the latest funding round is Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation.
For more on Plexpress see this week's issue of BioArray News.