NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Next-generation sequencing technology firm GnuBio has completed its Series A equity financing round raising $8 million, which the company will use to accelerate the beta program for its platform.
The round had 12 participants, though company CEO John Boyce declined to identify them. GnuBio raised the first $3 million of the round in November and raised the remaining $5 million upon hitting certain milestones, he said.
The company disclosed the funding in a document filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.
Boyce told GenomeWeb Daily News that GnuBio plans to use the majority of the funds to start its beta program in the middle to end of November by signing customers and further developing its sequencing platform.
Testing of the beta systems is planned for the first quarter of 2012 with a full commercial launch of the platform "shortly thereafter," at about $50,000 per instrument, Boyce said. The instrument is currently exceeding 600 base pairs with an accuracy of 99.97 percent on average and a yield on its droplets of "essentially 95 percent," he added.
In July GnuBio, based in Cambridge, Mass., shipped its first early-access instrument to the Université de Montréal Pharmacogenomics Centre at the Montreal Heart Institute in order to demonstrate its robustness. The platform is designed for the point-of-care market and to shorten the time to get test results to within an hour so that doctors can make clinical decisions more quickly.