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Two Pore Guys Raises $24.5M in Series A Round

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Two Pore Guys has closed a $24.5 million Series A financing round led by Khosla Ventures.

The Santa Cruz, California-based company said it planned to use the funding to scale up manufacturing of its hand-held nanopore sensor. In addition, it plans to expand its executive team — with a particular emphasis on hiring a head of manufacturing, CEO Dan Heller said. The financing will also help the firm accelerate development of applications for whole-genome sequencing and genome mapping.

Earlier this year, the company described its solid-state nanopore sensing technology and said it planned to launch a device on a limited basis with collaborators in the second half of the year. The firm uses synthetic probes to bind to targets of interest. The probes enable the target molecule to be detected as it passes through a solid-state nanopore.

The firm is developing the platform itself, but plans to develop specific assays in conjunction with third parties for applications in diagnostics, agriculture, food safety, and environmental monitoring. It is already working with the University of California, San Francisco to develop a liquid biopsy assay to detect KRAS mutations from blood and urine samples.

In a statement, Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla said that he decided to invest in Two Pore Guys because of the low capital requirements in the company's business model of partnering with third parties to develop specific tests.

"The capital requirements for bringing a test to market are now more like software companies because there is nothing for the developers to manufacture; they just design assays," he said. "[W]e can imagine entire bio-incubator operations and big data analyses based on 2PG's technology, opening the doors to a new world of real-time precision medicine."