NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Nanopore sequencing developer Quantapore said today it has raised nearly $15.6 million through the sale of Series 3 preferred stock.
Northern Light Venture Capital led the round. It was joined by Tsingyuan Ventures and Sangel Venture Capital as major investors and by Baidu Ventures and Cloudstone VC as additional investors. As part of the round, Northern Light Venture Capital founder Feng Deng has joined Quantapore's board of directors.
Quantapore plans to use the funding to build beta units of its optical nanopore sequencer for early adopters in industry and academia. Over the next several months, the firm also plans to hire additional software and hardware experts to accelerate the product's development.
The company, which raised $35 million in 2014, has developed a sequencing technology that is based on optical interaction between single DNA molecules and nanopores, which it says can be scaled to hundreds of thousands of nanopores per chip.
"With the support of our investors combined with the efforts of our talented and dedicated team, I look forward to taking Quantapore's technology to market and bringing the power of genomics within reach for researchers and clinicians everywhere," Quantapore CEO Martin Huber said in a statement.