Mobilion roars home to $35m series B

Mobilion Systems, a US-based biomedical equipment spinout of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), closed a $35m series B round yesterday involving commercialisation firm IP Group.
Life sciences-focused venture fund aMoon led the round, which also included diagnostics services provider Agilent Technologies, pension fund Hostplus, Cultivation Capital and undisclosed existing investors.
IP Group contributed both directly and through its North American subsidiary, and now controls a total 27.9% stake in Mobilion.
Founded in 2015, Mobilion offers scientific apparatus to help biopharmaceutical researchers separate, identify and analyse proteins and examine molecules such as glycans which existing methods struggle to determine.
The technology, dubbed Structures for Lossless Ion Manipulation (Slim), disintegrates each protein in conjunction with the lab’s liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry equipment, generating high-resolution analysis to distinguish pathogens associated with each biomolecule.
Slim is currently being used to help better understand how the Sars-CoV-2 virus binds to its target in order to develop treatments for Covid-19.
The series B cash will fund additions to Mobilion’s staff on the back of Slim’s initial release, advancing new standalone iterations that do not require integration with existing lab systems, mainly to facilitate diagnostics and quality control applications.
Todd Sone, a partner at aMoon, will join Mobilion’s board.
Slim is available only to select clients at present but Mobilion expects to release the product to the wider North American market in 2021.
The product builds on research led by Richard Smith, director of proteome research at PNNL and state-run research agency National Institutes of Health’s Research Resource for Integrative Biology.
Agilent Technologies led a $15.4m series A round for Mobilion in November 2019 that included IP Group, Hostplus, Cultivation Capital and iSelect Fund.