NuProbe Closes $42M Fundraising
HOUSTON and SHANGHAI, Jan. 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — NuProbe, a genomics and molecular diagnostics company specialized in ultrasensitive sequencing panels, announces the closing of its oversubscribed $42M fundraising. The lead investors for this financing round are BioTrack Capital and Yonghua Capital. The proceeds will be used to expand the commercial team in both the US and China, develop new NGS products, and file for regulatory approval in China for NuProbe’s clinical products.
“NuProbe has made great strides in 2020 in R&D, manufacturing, and commercialization. Furthermore, we have established a fast and efficient management workflow for the 100+ members of our team,” said Yingshuang Chai, co-founder and CEO of NuProbe. “We are very grateful for all of our investors’ support, and look forward to using this capital to accelerate our new product launch and market penetration.”
“NuProbe’s unique NGS technologies and its management’s proven commercial execution position NuProbe to be a leader in precision oncology and reproductive health in the coming years,” says Kevin Chen, founding partner of Biotrack Capital. “My fund and I are very excited to be part of the journey with NuProbe.”
“There is exponentially increasing awareness and demand for non-invasive liquid biopsies,” says Wen Chen, partner of healthcare investment at Yonghua Capital. “NuProbe’s differentiated technology platform allows improved access to liquid biopsy in human disease research.”
In addition to BioTrack Capital and Yonghua Capital who co-led the financing, Taifu Capital, Panlin Capital, Juming Capital, and Tuobang Capital also participated in the investment. BMD China served as financial advisors for this financing round. Additionally, NuProbe’s previous investors Sequoia Capital China, Ruomu Capital, and Serica Partners also co-invested in the deal.
“Sequencing blood plasma samples locally at the hospital is critical to rapid turnaround, in order to inform timely therapeutic decisions for cancer,” said David Walt, a member of NuProbe’s scientific advisory board (SAB) and the scientific co-founder of Illumina. “NuProbe’s allele enrichment technologies enable lower-throughput NGS instruments found in hospital labs to perform such liquid biopsies.”
George Church, another member of NuProbe’s SAB, adds, “Despite the consistently decreasing sequencing costs, many clinical and research sequencing applications such as those involving minimum residual disease (MRD) with tumor fraction of less than 1 part in ten thousand are not currently affordable. NuProbe provides a pathway to ultrasensitive MRD detection by sequencing.”
In the past 12 months, NuProbe has signed a number of partnership and licensing deals with internationally renowned companies in molecular diagnostics and life sciences, including Illumina, Qiagen, Oxford Nanopore, and the Wego Group. NuProbe has begun to partner with pharma companies for clinical research through its Augury™ custom NGS panels. In the reproductive health field in China, NuProbe has built collaborations with most of the top hospitals and is the leader in infertility testing.
“We are very encouraged to see that NuProbe’s products and services are gaining adoption in the United States, in China, and across the world” said David Zhang, co-founder and Head of Innovation of NuProbe. “We look forward to further serving the needs of our clinical and research customers in 2021, and anticipate the release of several new NuProbe products through the year.”
About NuProbe Global
NuProbe is a cutting-edge genomics and molecular diagnostics company with revolutionary molecular diagnostic technologies to improve the sensitivity of sequencing mutations and copy number variations by over 10-fold. NuProbe has sites in Houston, USA, Shanghai, China and Suzhou, China. NuProbe’s vision is to offer affordable, timely, and accurate disease state information to enable precision medicine and improve patient outcomes.
About BioTrack Capital
Founded in 2017, BioTrack Capital is a dedicated healthcare venture capital firm focused on investing and incubating innovative life science companies in China. We are more than just capital providers. We invest in long-term partnerships with China’s leading healthcare entrepreneurs to build the next generation of world class companies
About Yonghua Capital
Yonghua Capital is one of China’s most competitive private equity investors. As the primary investment vehicle of Yongjin Group, Yonghua Capital has rich experience in private equity investment and commits to become the most trustworthy financial service provider in the China capital market. So far Yonghua Capital has invested in over 100 outstanding companies, among which nearly 60 have been listed with stock exchanges. A seasoned team of professionals in industry research, finance, law and related regulatory policies, as well as the long-term cooperation with China’s well-known underwriters, law firms, accounting firms and other intermediaries, Yonghua Capital has succeeded in finding the undervalued companies and obtaining returns from the capital market.
About Sequoia China
The Sequoia Capital team helps daring founders build legendary companies. In partnering with Sequoia Capital, companies benefit from our unmatched community and the lessons we’ve learned over 49 years. As “The Entrepreneurs Behind The Entrepreneurs”, Sequoia Capital China focuses on three sectors: TMT, healthcare and consumer/service. Over the past 16 years we’ve had the privilege of working with approximately 600 companies in China.
