Cambridge, UK-based life science tools company, Lightcast Discovery, has successfully raised $49 million in a Series B funding round. The investment was led by M Ventures and saw participation from other prominent investors including ARCH Venture Partners, Illumina Ventures, OMX Ventures, +ND Capital, and Longwall Ventures.
The funds will be used to accelerate the company’s growth and expansion, leading up to a full commercial launch. This will be further enabled by the appointment of Paul Steinberg as Chief Commercial Officer (CCO).
Lightcast Discovery, under the leadership of CEO Paul Loeffen, is developing a groundbreaking single-cell functional analysis platform. The platform is based on a flexible droplet-based technology that can simultaneously load, select, process, analyze, and recover individual cells.
This innovative technology allows for the manipulation of addressable picolitre droplets with light in a massively parallel manner, enabling sequential assays beyond transcriptome-only readouts. The platform offers the flexibility to analyze a wide range of cell types and assays. Moreover, it provides the precision required to meticulously control and monitor the number, occupancy, location, and movement of each droplet.
The successful funding round underscores the potential of Lightcast Discovery’s novel technology in the life sciences field. It also highlights the increasing interest from investors in technologies that can advance our understanding of cellular functions on a single-cell level.
With the new funding and the appointment of Paul Steinberg as CCO, Lightcast Discovery is well-positioned to make significant strides in its growth and expansion plans. As the company prepares for a full commercial launch, the life science community eagerly awaits the impact of its revolutionary single-cell functional analysis platform.
