NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Mass spec technology firm Newomics has closed a $3.9 million Series A funding round.
The Berkeley, California-based company closed the round on Wednesday, said Daojing Wang, Newomics' founder and CEO, adding that it surpassed its initial target of $3.5 million. The round was led by the Berkeley Catalyst Fund and the Photon Fund.
According to Wang, the funds will be used to expand the company's management team and complete commercialization of its silicon-based multinozzle emitter array (MEA) technology, which the company said increases the sensitivity and robustness of LC-MS, as well as develop assays based on that technology.
The MEA device consists of a series of multinozzle emitters arranged in a circular array on a silicon chip. The multiple emitters allow for higher-throughput experiments, as each emitter can be interfaced to a separate LC system, which enables rapid sequential or parallel mass spec analyses. The increase in nozzles provides an improvement in sensitivity proportional to the square root of the number of nozzles per emitter.
Wang and his co-founder Pan Mao launched Newomics in 2013 as a spinout from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where the two invented the MEA technology.