NEW YORK – Spatial genomics startup Vizgen said on Thursday that it has raised $37 million in an oversubscribed Series B financing.
Novalis LifeSciences and Northpond Ventures led the round, joined by new investors Tao Capital Partners, Pura Vida Investments, and an unspecified US endowment fund as well as existing investors Arch Venture Partners and David Walt. Walt, a professor at Harvard Medical School, is a Vizgen cofounder and board member.
In a statement, Vizgen said it would use the proceeds "to grow to support commercialization and increase its manufacturing capacity" for its Merscope spatial transcriptomics technology.
The Harvard spinout is commercializing multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization (MERFISH) technology developed in Xiaowei Zhuang's lab. It raised $14 million in Series A financing in January 2020.
Novalis LifeSciences chairman and former Bayer and Thermo Fisher Scientific CEO Marijn Dekkers will join Vizgen's board. He is also chairman of the board at Ginkgo Bioworks.
According to its website, Novalis LifeSciences has also invested in Ginkgo, Quanterix, and Decipher Biosciences.
In 2021 alone, Northpond Ventures has participated in funding rounds for Scipher Medicine, Inflammatix, Personal Genome Diagnostics, Syapse, Encodia, and Delfi Diagnostics. Tao Capital also invested in Encodia.
"Funding from this Series B will enable us to bring the best tools for in situ single cell spatial genomics to the research community faster," Vizgen CEO Terry Lo said in a statement. "We are grateful to have such supportive investors and founders to help realize this mission."