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The round was led by a partnership of VCs; Tsingyuan Ventures, Lifespan Investments, and longtime Cardea investor Serra Ventures, as well as a life science industry insiders like Agilent Technologies, Table Mountain Capital, Photon Fund, and Taihill Venture (former Skylight Investment).
Dr. Biao He, Investment Partner at both Lifespan Investments and Tsingyuan Ventures stated: "Cardea is one of the best cross-disciplinary science and business teams we have ever met, and their ways of using biology as technology really impressed us. Their Tech+Bio Infrastructure is a result of extremely complex, but successful pioneer work, combining molecular biology with nanomaterial semiconductor electronics, that open up a lot of applications in the space in-between biology and the digital world. We believe this will be the start of a paradigm-shift in many areas of life science and biotech, due to the multi-omics data streaming of DNA, RNA and protein signals from biology linked up to computers in near real time."
The Company has achieved significant milestones since its last round of fundraising in March 2019. The company recently launched a breakthrough chipset; CRISPR-Chip™ that is built with its proprietary Cardean Transistors. The first of its kind chipset uses CRISPR as the transistor gate, and thereby harvests CRISPR's powerful natural ability to search through genomes for genetic sequences of interest. This is all accomplished without the need of PCR/DNA amplification, enabling the user to observe the CRISPR search activity and results LIVE on a computer screen.
CRISPR-Chip became the most read Nature Biomedical Engineering paper published last year and was the cover story of the June issue of Nature BME. The CRISPR-Chip is just one of more innovative chipsets Cardea offers its partners via the Cardea Innovation Partnership Program, which is the core of the Company's business model. In just 18 month the program has received tremendous response with hundreds of companies expressing their interest in potential product development partnerships. The Company expects the first "Powered by Cardea" products to launch in 2020 and 2021.
Cardea's Chief Business Officer, Rob Lozuk stated: "We envision a future where "Powered by Cardea" products, all running on the same type of chipsets, will significantly impact and improve large markets from human health, agriculture, food and water safety, diagnostics, and environmental monitoring to quality control, security, and drug development."
"We are thrilled to have found very smart investors that understand the enormous potential of combining biology directly with electronic technology, and together with us, believe in our bold vision where one day very soon humankind will be using biology as technology," says Michael Heltzen, CEO and Co-founder at Cardea and continues, "We welcome Tsingyuan, Lifespan, Agilent and many others as new shareholders, and we thank Serra Ventures and our other loyal existing shareholders for their continued support and trust in Cardea and our team of talents."
About Cardea Bio
Cardea is linking biology directly up to computers for the very first time by building a Tech+Bio Infrastructure and offering chipsets based on proprietary Biology-gated Transistors, or Cardean Transistors™. These transistors leverage graphene, a nanomaterial that in contrast to the common semiconductor material silicon, is biocompatible and a near perfect conductor due to only being one atom thick. It that way replaces optical static observations with interactive live-streams of multi-omics signal analysis, representing a new life science observation paradigm where multi-omics data-streams will be the new norm instead of most of the current standard technologies that are single-omics frozen-in-time datasets. Together with their Innovation Partners, Cardea can link biology directly to compute power and convert real-time biological signals to digital information, allowing for immediate biological insight and a new generation of applications Linking up to Life.
Cardea Bio
