The round, which takes Indee's equity total to $3.9m, featured Main Sequence Ventures.
2Indee Labs, a US-based genetic material chip developer based in part on research from University of South Australia (UniSA), received $2.6m on Thursday in a seed round led by VC firm Founders Fund.
Main Sequence Ventures, which manages the $150m Innovation Fund launched by Australian government-backed research network Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (Csiro), backed the round together with unnamed angel investors.
Indee Labs is working on a microchip-based gene delivery platform based on an approach called microfluidic vortex shedding, which is expected to insert engineered genetic material into dormant human cells more efficiently than current alternatives.
The chip, expected to process materials at a rate of 2 million cells per second, is being developed at the Australian National Fabrication Facility, part of UniSA’s Future Industries Institute.
The seed capital will drive recruitment, as Indee Labs aims to create a user-friendly device capable of outperforming incumbent gene delivery technologies on metrics such as patient lead times.
Indee Labs has now secured a total of $3.9m in equity capital, in addition to $1.5m in grant funding which includes $695,000 recently awarded by Australian government’s BioMedTech Horizons research initiative.
The grant will be used to finance Indee’s business operations and chip development at UniSA.
Indee previously closed a $1.3m angel round at an undisclosed date with contributions from accelerator Y Combinator as well as private backers Jude Gomila, Shaun Maguire and Jaffray Woodriff. Incubator MBC Biolabs suggests the angel round occurred in July 2017.
