NEW YORK – Biosensing startup Pleno said Wednesday that it has closed a $40 million Series A funding round.
The round was led by Deerfield Management with participation from Foresite Capital. San Diego-based Pleno said it will use the funds to accelerate development of its Raptor instrument platform, which uses the firm's Hypercoding technology. It combines barcoded DNA and signal processing to enable highly plexed, high-throughput detection of nucleic acids.
According to Pleno, the Raptor system will be capable of detecting up to 10,000 nucleic acid targets per sample and processing up to 10,000 samples per day. It will offer a more streamlined, less expensive, and higher-throughput alternative to next-generation sequencing in applications looking to analyze large numbers of known nucleic acid targets.
The platform will also enable analysis of other kinds of analytes, such as proteins.
The company is planning an early-access launch of the platform in 2023 and a broad commercial launch in 2024.
The Series A round follows $15 million in pre-Series A funding the company announced in May.
"Deerfield is proud to lead Pleno’s Series A financing,” Andrew ElBardissi, a partner at Deerfield Management, said in a statement. "Pleno’s team has developed a versatile platform at the intersection of technology and life sciences which has the potential to disrupt existing sequencing and multiomic approaches that are critical for drug development and clinical diagnostics."
"The overwhelming interest already received from potential customers has clearly shown just how important this technology is and how much it is needed across a wide variety of applications, ranging from early cancer screening, NIPT, and infectious diseases, to pharmacogenomics, proteomics, and agrigenomics," Pieter van Rooyen, Pleno's founder and CEO, added.