Dash Bio has raised $30 million in Series A financing to expand its automated bioanalysis platform for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Oak HC/FT led the round, with participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and Swift Ventures. The financing brings Dash Bio’s total capital raised to $47.5 million.
Bioanalysis involves laboratory testing used to measure the safety, exposure and effectiveness of drugs in preclinical and clinical samples. The resulting data helps pharmaceutical developers determine how experimental medicines behave and whether they should advance through development.
Dash Bio said much of the approximately $5 billion bioanalysis market still depends on manual labor, paper records and service models that can take months to return results.
The company has built a 24,000-square-foot laboratory that combines robotics, a proprietary laboratory operating system and standardized assay workflows.
Its available testing capabilities include ELISA, MSD, quantitative polymerase chain reaction, droplet digital PCR and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry.
Dash Bio said its automated platform can return some preclinical sample results in days rather than months. It also offers fixed, transparent pricing and end-to-end digital traceability, allowing customers to follow samples and data throughout the process.
Since beginning its commercial efforts approximately nine months ago, Dash Bio has signed contracts with more than 30 customers. These include four of the world’s 15 largest pharmaceutical companies.
The company said customers frequently cite turnaround times and pricing transparency as reasons for selecting Dash instead of established contract research organizations.
Dash Bio plans to use the financing to expand its commercial operations, laboratory capacity and assay menu. It will also enter additional testing categories and continue developing its proprietary software platform.
The company was founded by CEO Dave Johnson, COO Ander Tallett and Chief Scientific Officer Ely Porter. Members of the founding team previously helped develop digital and automation infrastructure at Moderna during its rapid expansion.
KEY QUOTES:
“Sponsors and patients can’t wait. We built Dash on a deep conviction: the pace of drug development should be set by the science, not by queues and legacy process.”
“Our goal is to push deliverable timelines to the very limits of the underlying chemistry, physics and biology. Everything about how we operate, from our tech-first approach to our transparent, fixed pricing, is built to serve that goal, and ultimately to get medicines to patients faster.”
Dave Johnson, Co-Founder and CEO of Dash Bio
“In less than two years, the Dash team has built a GLP-compliant, fully automated bioanalysis platform that the industry’s largest drug developers are already adopting.”
“The team’s background architecting the digital and automation infrastructure at Moderna during one of the most consequential scale-ups in modern history brings a playbook and level of experience to productizing and scaling infrastructure for science that very few founders in this space can match.”
Andy Smith, Partner at Oak HC/FT
