Sweden’s Moleculent Raises $20M to Expand US Operations and Launch Commercial Instrument
The Stockholm-based startup has closed a new financing round led by Rubicon Healthcare Partners, with participation from ARCH Venture Partners and Eir Ventures.
Moleculent, a Stockholm-based life sciences technology company developing a platform to map cell-cell communication in human tissue, has closed a $20 million financing round.
Rubicon Healthcare Partners led the round, with participation from Arch Venture Partners, Eir Ventures, and other existing investors, the company said on April 30.
The proceeds will support expansion of Moleculent’s early access program, accelerate commercial operations in the US, and fund the commercial launch of its instrument platform.
“We are seeing surging demand from leading research institutions and pharmaceutical partners across both Europe and the US,” Moleculent CEO and Cofounder Olle Ericsson said in a statement. “This new funding allows us to move more aggressively as we work to put this platform into the hands of the scientists decoding the cellular conversations that drive human disease.”
Moleculent’s platform is built on its proprietary proximity ligation assay, which detects cell-cell interactions within intact tissue. The platform also enables cell typing through protein detection to provide tissue context. The company is developing an automated instrument intended to support large-scale studies with high reproducibility and reduced hands-on time, and is targeting a commercial launch following the current early access phase.
“For years, we’ve been able to see where cells are and what they express, but we couldn’t see how they actually talk to each other in the tissue. Moleculent changes that completely — this is the kind of tool that reshapes entire research programs,” Nigel Jamieson, a researcher at the University of Glasgow who runs a spatial biology-focused core lab, said in a statement.
Moleculent is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. The company did not disclose previous funding rounds.
As part of the financing, Ole Dahlberg, managing partner at Rubicon Healthcare Partners, has joined Moleculent’s board of directors.