Insider Brief
- Dash Bio raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Oak HC/FT, bringing its total capital raised to $47.5 million.
- The company will use the funding to expand commercial operations, laboratory capacity and testing services, enter new categories and continue developing its proprietary software platform.
- Dash Bio operates a 24,000-square-foot automated bioanalysis lab and has signed more than 30 customers, including four of the world’s 15 largest pharmaceutical companies.
Dash Bio has raised $30 million in Series A funding to expand its automated bioanalysis laboratory and software platform, bringing its total capital raised to $47.5 million.
Oak HC/FT led the round, with participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and Swift Ventures. According to the company, it will use the funding to grow commercial operations, increase laboratory capacity, add more testing services, enter new categories and continue developing its proprietary software.
Dash Bio operates a 24,000-square-foot laboratory that combines robotics with a custom operating system and standardized testing workflows. The company is targeting bioanalysis, the laboratory work used to measure the safety and effectiveness of drug candidates in preclinical and clinical samples.
The company pointed out that traditional providers often rely on manual processes and paper records, resulting in long turnaround times. Dash Bio claims its platform can return some preclinical results in days rather than months while providing fixed pricing and digital tracking of samples.
“Sponsors and patients can’t wait,” co-founder and CEO Dave Johnson said in the announcement. “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. Everything about how we operate, from our tech-first approach to our transparent, fixed pricing, is built to serve that goal, and ultimately to get medicines to patients faster.”
Dash Bio has has reported signing contracts with more than 30 customers since beginning commercial operations about nine months ago, including four of the world’s 15 largest pharmaceutical companies.
“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,” added Andy Smith, partner at Oak HC/FT. “The team’s background architecting the digital and automation infrastructure at Moderna during one of the most consequential scale-ups in modern history brings a playbook and level of experience to productizing and scaling infrastructure for science that very few founders in this space can match.”
