NEW YORK – Day Zero Diagnostics, a developer of whole-genome sequencing-based infectious disease tests, said on Wednesday that it has completed a $16 million financing round, bringing the total raised by the firm to date to $49 million in venture capital funding and more than $18 million in non-dilutive funding.
The financing was executed as a convertible note and investors from a prior financing round contributed.
Day Zero Diagnostics, based in Boston, intends to bring same-day organism identification and antimicrobial susceptibility profiling directly from clinical samples to market as a US Food and Drug Administration-cleared diagnostic, CEO and Cofounder Jong Lee said in a statement.
"This funding is a strong vote of confidence in Day Zero Diagnostics' potential to use rapid sequencing and AI to disrupt microbiology lab diagnostics," Lee said.
The company will use the funding to complete development of an improved sample prep protocol called Blood2Bac that can capture fungi as well as bacteria at a low cost using small sample volumes.
The funding will also be used to accelerate development of a prototype for the firm's commercial system, including both the hardware system and a family of cloud-based AI algorithms called Keynome that provide high-accuracy organism ID and antimicrobial susceptibility profiling.
Day Zero Diagnostics obtained a $300,000 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research award last month from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop a safety and efficacy assay for fecal microbiota transplants. The firm has previously been awarded $14.4 million from CARB-X, a nonprofit organization.