PROVIDENCE – Rhode Island-based genome-mapping firm Nabsys Inc. has closed a $25 million round of funding from Hitachi High-Technologies Corp., a Japanese company that has provided a previous round of funding for Nabsys.
Nabsys said Wednesday that the funding will be used to complete development and commercialization of the second-generation of its high-definition mapping platform while hiring more personnel in research and development, manufacturing and global commercial operations. The deal will provide an additional $13 million in funding when Nabsys reaches certain milestones, the company said.
“Our first-generation [high-definition mapping] instruments have been in customers’ hands for over a year now and have been very well-received,” Nabsys CEO Dr. Barrett Bready said in a statement. “We are excited to capitalize on the highly scalable nature of our high-speed, single-molecule, electronic detection to increase throughput and expand the application space.”
Bready formed the company in 2007 but later stepped away and a new CEO, Steve Lombardi, arrived in 2014. Nabsys then closed in 2015. The company reopened a month later, once again under Bready’s leadership, following a restructuring.
In 2019, Hitachi provided $21 million in funding for Nabsys.
“Hitachi High-Tech has had a long-standing interest in the analysis of human structural variation and has been in search of a technology to meet the significant market need,” said Tsuyoshi Ogino, general manager of Hitachi High-Tech America Inc.’s Molecular Research & Diagnostics Division. “We believe the Nabsys HDM platform is the ideal solution for that important unmet need.”
