Swedish Spatial Biology Startup Haga Bioscience Raises $2.2M Seed Round
Stockholm-based Haga Bio will use the funds to commercialize spatial tools capable of validating smaller sets of RNA biomarkers found using transcriptome-wide methods.
Haga Bioscience, a Stockholm-based spatial biology company, said on June 3 that it has closed an oversubscribed SEK 20.9 million ($2.2 million) seed financing round.
The round included participation from Almi Invest, Life Science Invest, and SU Ventures, joined by an undisclosed list of other investors.
The company said it will use the funding to begin commercializing its spatial biology technologies, which are designed for clinical validation and translational workflows. The financing also supports collaborations with academic and industry partners.
“Discovery is no longer the bottleneck,” Haga Bio Cofounder Mats Nilsson said in a statement. “The next major step for the field is translating and validating these discoveries at scale and ultimately into clinical use. That is precisely what Haga Bio aims to enable.”
The company’s platform enables sensitive and specific detection of single nucleotide variants (SNVs) in RNA in situ. The methods were developed by cofounders Hower Lee, who serves as CEO; Marco Grillo, who serves as CSO; and Nilsson, a professor at Stockholm University.
Founded in 2024, Haga Bio has designed technologies to validate RNA biomarkers in large clinical studies while remaining cost-effective and scalable. The company said it has now raised a total of approximately $3 million.
Additional co-founders include Malte Kuhnemund, Daniel Gyllborg, and Xiaoyan Qian, all veterans of 10x Genomics. Kuhnemund and Qian cofounded Cartana in 2017, a SciLifeLab spinout whose in situ RNA sequencing technology was acquired by 10x Genomics in 2020 and integrated into its Xenium spatial transcriptomics platform.
Haga Bio announced an early access program in May. Through the program, the company is providing access to two products: Haga Pattern, a multiplexed spatial gene expression assay, and Haga Point, a spatial assay for in situ SNV detection on RNA.
“Until now, the field has lacked robust in situ variant calling on FFPE tissue samples with high sensitivity and specificity,” Lee said in a statement. “Addressing this challenge enables new possibilities for translational research.”