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.