STOCKHOLM — Moleculent AB has raised $20 million in new financing to scale its functional profiling platform, expand its early access program and accelerate commercial operations in the United States.
The round was led by Rubicon Healthcare Partners, with participation from ARCH Venture Partners, Eir Ventures and other existing investors. The company said the funding will support expansion of its Techstart Early Access Program and help drive the commercial launch of its instrument.
Moleculent is developing technology designed to map cell-to-cell communication at scale in human tissue. The company said its platform is intended to help researchers better understand the cellular interactions that drive human disease and support drug development.
“The market is telling us it’s ready,” said Olle Ericsson, PhD, Co-Founder and CEO of Moleculent. “We are seeing surging demand from leading research institutions and pharmaceutical partners across both Europe and the US. With Rubicon joining ARCH and Eir Ventures, we now have a syndicate of builders with successful track records of scaling life science companies from breakthrough technology to global impact. This new funding allows us to move more aggressively as we work to put this platform into the hands of the scientists decoding the cellular conversations that drive human disease.”
As part of the financing, Ole Dahlberg, Managing Partner at Rubicon Healthcare Partners, has joined Moleculent’s board of directors. Dahlberg has more than 20 years of international management experience in life sciences, including roles at Life Technologies and Qiagen. He previously led cell biology and sample preparation at Thermo Fisher Scientific.
“We have evaluated platforms across the life sciences tools landscape for years, and Moleculent stands out as truly category-defining,” said Dahlberg. “The company’s approach to directly mapping cell-cell communication has the potential to transform how researchers study disease and develop therapies. The science, the team, and the early traction with world-class research partners gave us the conviction to lead this round.”
Moleculent also said it is expanding Techstart, its Early Access Program that gives select academic and biopharma partners priority access to the platform before commercial launch.
“For years, we’ve been able to see where cells are and what they express, but we couldn’t see how they actually talk to each other in the tissue,” said Nigel Jamieson, Professor of Pancreatic and Liver Surgery at the University of Glasgow, and an inaugural Techstart partner. “Moleculent changes that completely—this is the kind of tool that reshapes entire research programs.”
The company’s technology is based on its proprietary Proximity Ligation Assay, which detects cell-to-cell interactions in their native environment at high-plex. The platform also enables cell typing through detection of individual proteins to provide tissue context.
Moleculent said it is developing an automated instrument to make the technology available to translational laboratories globally, with the goal of supporting large-scale studies with high reproducibility and limited hands-on time.
