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Lightcast Discovery Nabs $49M in Series B Funding to Commercialize Single-Cell Analysis Tech

NEW YORK – UK single-cell technology company Lightcast Discovery said on Thursday that it has completed a £38 million ($49 million) Series B funding round.

The round was led by M Ventures, with participation from existing investors ARCH Venture Partners, Illumina Ventures, OMX Ventures, +ND Capital, and Longwall Ventures.

Based in Cambridge, Lightcast said it is developing a droplet-based single-cell functional analysis platform "that can load, select, process, analyze, and recover tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of individual cells at the same time." The company claimed its platform can manipulate picoliter droplets with light in a massively parallel manner, enabling sequential assays beyond transcriptome-only readouts.

The Series B funding will help accelerate Lightcast’s growth and expansion leading up to its full commercial launch, the company said.

The firm also said it named Paul Steinberg as chief commercial officer. He previously held the same role at Resolve Biosciences and Levitas Bio. Steinberg also held sales and marketing leadership roles at NanoString Technologies and Fluidigm prior to those positions.

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