- Biobot Analytics — a technology company that deploys wastewater monitoring equipment — announced it has raised $4.2 million
Biobot Analytics — a technology company that deploys wastewater monitoring equipment and analytical tools to provide novel public health insights at the community level — has announced it has raised $4.2 million, bringing its total amount of seed funding to $6.7 million. And in response to the emerging crisis, Biobot has started deploying its platform to track the spread of COVID-19 and map its prevalence in cities across the U.S.
This round of funding was led by The Engine, which is the venture firm spun out of MIT that invests in early-stage Tough Tech companies looking to solve the world’s most urgent problems through the convergence of breakthrough science, engineering, and leadership.
And AmFam Institute Impact Fund joined the round as a strategic investor. Previous investors Y Combinator and DCVC also joined the round.
This funding round will be used to support the rapid growth of operations to address pandemic challenges and fund additional market expansion and product development.
Biobot was developed at MIT where the two founders Mariana Matus, PhD and Newsha Ghaeli had combined their computational biology, wastewater epidemiology, and urban planning backgrounds to develop the technology. This technology can provide sub-city-level human health data.
And using anonymous data collected from sewage, Biobot’s platform can trace health indicators that provide insights into drug use, the presence of viruses, environmental contaminants, and nutrition.
Biobot had conducted its first commercial implementation of the technology with an opioid analytics program in Cary, NC. And the company’s analysis gave local officials accurate information on the use of opioids so they could better lead productive interventions, reducing overdoses by 40% and lowering their associated cost to the healthcare system. Now seven cities in Massachusetts are conducting initial studies with the Biobot opioid product.
In collaboration with researchers at MIT, Harvard, and Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Biobot launched a campaign to solicit wastewater from facilities across the U.S. And its research protocol and findings from an initial review of samples from a large urban facility in MA were detailed in the academic paper — which can be found on MedRxiv called “SARS-COV-2 titers in wastewater are higher than expected from clinically confirmed cases.”
Key Quotes:
“Doctors use waste samples regularly to understand, diagnose and care for our individual wellbeing. We are deploying our technology to do the same at the population level, which is tremendously valuable to government and private sector partners and will be core to public health improvement and the development of smart cities.”
-Mariana Matus, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Biobot Analytics
“We are thrilled to support Biobot in accelerating growth of their company. The team has shown the potential of using our wastewater systems for mitigating the opioid crisis and now is the time to extend the approach to addressing other important health challenges, from COVID-19 and other viruses to environmental contaminants.”
-Ann DeWitt, general partner at The Engine
