NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – 10X Genomics of Pleasanton, Calif., has raised $55.5 million in a Series B financing round, the company said today.
Lead investor Foresite Capital Management was joined by Venrock, the leader of the Series A round. Other investors included Paladin Capital Group and funds managed by Morgan Stanley Investment Management.
The new round brings 10X Genomics' total funding raised to date to more than $80 million.
The company has been developing a platform that complements existing short-read sequencing platforms and helps to identify structural variants, haplotypes, and other long-range genomic information for applications such as targeted, exome, and whole-genome sequencing.
According to its website, the platform is a molecular barcoding and analysis system that works in conjunction with short-read sequencers. It will initially be compatible with Illumina sequencing systems. The core technology is an "innovative reagent delivery system and set of algorithms and software."
The reagent delivery system randomly partitions and barcodes DNA fragments prior to preparing sequencing libraries in parallel. The "fundamental building block" of the system is a bead loaded with barcoded primers that is encapsulated in a dynamic reaction chamber. Using the barcodes, custom software maps short read data to the original long fragments to recover long-range genomic information.
10X Genomics plans to present its platform, which uses picoscale reaction systems, next month at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference.
Serge Saxonov, a former director of R&D at 23andMe and a former executive of QuantaLife, founded the company and serves as its CEO. Other founders include Ben Hindson, chief scientific officer, and Kevin Ness, chief technology officer, also former executives at QuantaLife, as well as John Stuelpnagel, former CEO of Illumina.