Stellaromics raises $80 million

Stellaromics, a start-up that uses multiomics technology to help researchers understand the spatial organization of cells and tissues, has raised $80 million in a series B financing.

Catalyst4, a Silicon Valley nonprofit founded by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, led the funding round. Stanford University’s venture arm also participated.

Stellaromics launched in 2022 based on work by Stanford bioengineer and psychiatrist Karl Deisseroth and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard chemist Xiao Wang. Its main sell is an instrument called Pyxa, which uses 3D sequencing to detect and track gene expression patterns and visualize cell clusters in intact tissue, among other capabilities. Pyxa offers analysis of tissue slices that are 100 µm thick or more, the spatial distribution of thousands of genes, and genomics data, according to a press release.

The series B funding will help support Pyxa’s commercial launch, slated for the second half of this year. The start-up says a handful of researchers at Stanford, the University of Glasgow, Scripps Research, and Oregon Health & Science University have already begun to use the instrument for neuroscience and cancer research.

“As a scientific co-founder, it’s incredibly gratifying to see this technology come to fruition and empower researchers to explore the intricacies of biology in 3D,” Wang says in the statement.

Stellaromics is led by CEO Todd Dickinson, a former product development director at Illumina who was with the instrumentation firm for over 10 years and later helmed the start-ups Arc Bio and Dovetail Genomics as CEO. The company previously raised a $25 million series A funding round in 2023 from Plaisance Capital Management and an unnamed private family office based in Silicon Valley.