This story originally ran on Oct. 21.
Swedish sample prep firm Denator this week said it has completed its fourth financing round, raising 15 million SEK ($2.2 million).
The proceeds are expected to be sufficient to reach positive cash flow and will be used to "continue building Denator's position in the global protein research market," the Gothenburg-based company said in a statement. More specifically, the money will be used to develop Denator's product line and research activities and to expand the firm's sales and marketing activities.
Investors in the round include existing investors T-bolaget, Wikow Ventures, Servisen Holding, and private shareholders. New investors in the round included Svenska Garantiprodukter.
In a statement, Denator CEO Olaf Sköld said the financing round "underlines the significant commercial opportunity the company has through applying its stabilization technology to several fields within the life-science market."
The company, which was founded in 2004, made its first commercial product launch a year ago with the Stabilizor T1 for the instant stabilization of tissue samples. According to Denator, the technology prevents degradation in tissues, allowing researchers to study biological samples and their proteins and peptides closer to an in vivo state.
During the summer, Denator announced it was heading a consortium to improve the handling of blood plasma samples with the aim of advancing the discovery of blood-based protein biomarkers. The effort received €300,000 ($$450,000) from the EU Eurostars Programme [See PM 08/27/09].
Other members of the consortium are Sigolos, a technology firm based in Uppsala, Sweden; the Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry Unit at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands; and the BioScope group at Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal.