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Vizgen Launches With $14M Series A Financing

NEW YORK – Vizgen, a new startup in the spatial genomics field, said on Thursday that it has received $14 million in a Series A funding round led by Arch Venture Partners and Northpond Ventures.

In a statement, Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Vizgen said it would use the funds to accelerate commercialization of its patented "multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization" (MERFISH) platform. The technology enables spatially resolved, single-cell transcriptomics.

Xiaowei Zhuang, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, developed MERFISH in her lab at Harvard University with cofounder Jeffrey Moffitt, now a researcher at Boston Children's Hospital. Harvard's David Walt is also a cofounder and a member of the firm's board of directors.

"MERFISH is a game-changing technology in single-cell genomics and has broad applications in both fundamental biology and medicine," Walt, who also cofounded Illumina, Quanterix, and other firms, said in a statement. "Error detection and correction enable researchers to get the right answer. Vizgen's patented technology is critical for powering this unprecedented massively multiplexed single-molecule detection capability."

Northpond has recently participated in funding rounds for Inflammatix, IsoPlexis, Scipher, ChromaCode, SGI-DNA, SpeeDx, and Ultivue.

Arch Venture Partners also participated in Ultivue's Series C round. Over the last year, it also funded LunaPBC and One BioMed.

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