NEW YORK – GenapSys said today that is has raised $90 million in a Series C funding round.
The round was led by Foresite Capital and brings the total funding raised by the firm to date to $166 million.
The Redwood, California-based company plans to use the new funds to drive the commercial launch of its first sequencing instrument, the GenapSys Sequencer, which is now available for order in the US at a list price of $9,995, with a global launched planned for early 2020.
According to its website, the company also offers the GenapSys Sequencing Prep System for automated clinical amplification and enrichment, which has a list price of $9,900. A sequencing kit for a single run and an amplification kit for the Sequencing Prep System each cost $299.
"With our new sequencer, we can rapidly enable and scale genomics power to every researcher, physician, provider, and patient around the world," said GenapSys CEO Hesaam Esfandyarpour in a statement.
"We believe high accuracy, low-cost distributed sequencing will enable a much larger market for sequencing," said Jim Tananbaum, cofounder and managing director of Foresite Capital, in a statement.
The sequencer uses a stepwise sequencing-by-synthesis chemistry and detects the incorporation of nucleotides through an electrical signal, measured using CMOS-based detectors on a microfluidic chip.
According to the company's website, the platform routinely generates data where more than 80 percent of bases have a quality score greater than Q30, with an average read length of more than 150 base pairs.
As previously reported, the system can run three types of chips with 1 million, 16 million, and 144 million sensors, respectively. The 16-million chip generates 1.2 Gb to 2 Gb of data, according to the firm, and the 144 million sensor chip will be available next year.
Earlier this year at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting, GenapSys discussed data generated on the platform internally and by early-access customers.
In addition, the company published a preprint with data generated on its platform internally this spring.