The protein sequencing company Alamar Biosciences has collected $128 million in venture capital funding to boost the commercial roll out of its research hardware unveiled in the past year.
The series C round—which includes an initial closing of $100 million, with the remaining $28 million expected to come in the next month, according to the company—was led by Sands Capital, and included backing from additional unnamed investors.
“Proteomics represents a dynamic and fast-growing market with significant opportunity for disruption as new platforms providing both higher sensitivity and multiplex capability are needed to accelerate proteomics research and translation,” said Sands’ executive managing partner, Ian Ratcliffe, who joins Alamar’s board of directors. “The enthusiasm we have seen from early customers makes us believe that Alamar is poised to become a leader in the evolving proteomics space.”
At the top of this year, Alamar kicked off the commercial debut of its Argo HT automated protein analyzer, with a capacity of up to 288 samples per batched run and multiplexing support for a range of biomarker profiling tasks.
The system launched alongside the company’s NULISAseq inflammation panel for characterizing the body’s defensive responses among autoimmune disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular disease and cancer.
“We are thrilled to bring this game-changing platform to the market as it solves a huge unmet need in biomarker analysis for an automated solution for high sensitivity, multiplexed detection of proteins,” Alamar’s founder and CEO, Yuling Luo, said in the company’s January announcement. “We have already received 10 purchase orders from participants in our early access program and have completed successful instrument placements at six sites within the U.S.”
Previously, in April 2023, the Fremont, California-based Alamar put forward NULISA as a proteomic liquid biopsy platform. Short for NUcleic acid Linked Immuno-Sandwich Assay, the approach aims to detect about 200 immune system cytokines, chemokines and other related proteins using next-generation sequencing.
In the interim, Alamar helped launch a joint venture with Frazier Life Sciences, dubbed Attovia Therapeutics, with a focus on building a pipeline of biotherapeutics in immune-mediated diseases and cancer. The company launched in June 2023 with $60 million in series A financing backed by Frazier, venBio and Illumina Ventures.