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NGS Technology Firm Stratos Genomics Raises $10M

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Stratos Genomics has raised $10 million toward a Series B financing round targeting $16.3 million.

The Seattle-based firm disclosed the raise in a Form D filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. In an email to GenomeWeb Daily News, Stratos Chairman and CEO Alan Stephan said the $10 million is the first close of a Series B round. He declined to comment further, saying more information will be released after the second close is completed.

In March, the firm told In Sequence that the Series B funding would go toward the development of a low-cost sequencing platform that combines the speed and throughput of nanopores with improved resolution and signal to noise, both for targeted and whole-genome sequencing.

Stratos was founded in 2007 as a spinout of engineering firm the Stratos Group. It raised $4 million in a Series A financing round in 2010 and garnered another $2.1 million in 2011 and $2 million in 2012 after it demonstrated that it was able to sequence a 36-base DNA template. Investors added a $2 million infusion last year after Stratos showed it could generate a 210-base read.

Stratos' technology, called sequencing by expansion, or SBX, converts DNA into a larger surrogate molecule containing reporter molecules that represent the DNA bases and generate a stronger signal, as company officials described to In Sequence. The surrogate molecule then passes through a nanopore with a detector to read out the signal, which is translated back into DNA sequence.