Nirmidas, a biotech spun out of Stanford University, has raised $2m in a seed round which included an undisclosed venture capital firm, an unnamed life science angel investor and Stanford’s StartX fund.

Nirmidas develops diagnostic research technology; its lead product is so-called fluorescence enhancing plasmonic gold technology, dubbed pGold. The non-invasive technology is able to identify biomarkers of diseases such as cancer, auto-immune disorders or diabetes early on and thus provide better and more efficient care. It is being commercialised after nearly a decade of research at the university and first entered the market in March 2014.

Nirmidas is using the Janssen Labs at the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences’s incubator in San Franscisco, and has also joined StartX Med, a non-profit accelerator affiliated with Stanford.

Hongjie Dai, co-founder of Nirmidas Biotech, said: “Fluorescence is broadly used in diagnostic testing and biological research. Our signal enhancing technology simply makes it easier to see and detect various debilitating medical issues and diseases at the earliest stage possible. We believe it can be a real life saver.”