WALTHAM, Mass. — Dash Bio has raised $30 million in Series A financing to expand its automated bioanalysis platform and accelerate drug development timelines, the company announced.
The round was led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and Swift Ventures. The financing brings Dash Bio’s total funding to $47.5 million.
Bioanalysis involves laboratory testing that measures a drug’s safety and effectiveness in preclinical and clinical samples. Dash Bio said the roughly $5 billion bioanalysis market continues to rely heavily on manual labor and paper-based records, which can delay results for months and increase costs for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Dash Bio has developed a bioanalysis platform designed to improve speed, automation and transparency. Its 24,000-square-foot, Good Laboratory Practice-compliant facility combines robotics, a proprietary laboratory operating system and standardized assay workflows.
The platform supports technologies including enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, Meso Scale Discovery, quantitative polymerase chain reaction, droplet digital PCR and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry.
Dash Bio said it provides fixed and transparent pricing, end-to-end digital traceability and preclinical sample results within days rather than months. The automated approach is intended to reduce manual work and delays typically associated with traditional contract research organizations.
“Sponsors and patients can’t wait,” said Dave Johnson, Co-founder and CEO of Dash Bio. “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.”
Johnson said the company’s technology-focused operations and transparent, fixed pricing are designed to help medicines reach patients more quickly.
Since beginning its commercial efforts about nine months ago, Dash Bio has signed contracts with more than 30 customers, including four of the world’s 15 largest pharmaceutical companies. The company said customers have identified speed and pricing transparency as key reasons for choosing its platform over established providers.
“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,” said Andy Smith, Partner at Oak HC/FT.
Smith said the founders’ experience developing digital and automation infrastructure at Moderna gave the team expertise in building and scaling scientific infrastructure.
Dash Bio plans to use the funding to expand its commercial operations, assay offerings and laboratory capacity. It will also enter additional service categories and continue developing its proprietary software platform.
