A new company emerged from stealth this morning in San Francisco Bay, and it's one focused on research technology. Nodexus, a bio company that develops automated live cell characterization and isolation technologies, announced its launch this morning with a Series A netting it $30 million. Even though Nodexus does not develop its own drugs, the Series A was led by major biotech investor RA Capital Management, with participation from California VC fund Section 32 and some previous investors. This comes at the same time Nodexus brings on a new board member: former president at BD Biosciences Bill Rhodes. According to Nodexus, the $30 million it raised will allow the company to expand manufacturing of its flagship platform NX One, as well as build its commercialization capabilities and pipeline to meet demand. Nodexus founder and CEO Karthik Balakrishnan told Endpoints News that the funds will last a while. "This will give us over two years of runway to grow our commercial organization and develop our pipeline," Balakrishnan said in an interview. Growth is also a goal for the company, as it wants to expand to 35 employees sometime in the near future. But there's no hard timeline yet. Nodexus has been aiming to, as Balakrishnan puts it, create a universally adoptable way of isolating cells in a biological sample. That will hopefully come into play with the NX-One platform. And that platform accompanies a swath of other tech, Balakrishnan told Endpoints, such as hardware instrumentation, microfluidic cartridges and accompanying software. The goal of the platform is to take what has typically been restricted to centralized facilities and provide something that could be used by pretty much any lab, from a small startup or academic site to a large firm. Balakrishnan founded the biotech as a spinout out from UC Berkeley, where the founder got his PhD in Mechanical Engineering. He leveraged some of the IP he worked on while as a grad student. And as for why Nodexus took seven years to come out of stealth? A lot of additional R&D was needed, with an emphasis in manufacturability. Moving forward, Balakrishnan said Nodexus has been approached by a number of potential partners in R&D and commercialization. While those parties remain unnamed, "we'll be evaluating those very closely as we move forward," he said.
