Participated · Series A · Sep 2020

Cardea Bio is a San Diego-based company developing an electronic nose platform intended to rapidly diagnose infectious diseases. The company says the technology aims to enable fast, point-of-need detection. Cardea plans to tailor the development for use in developing countries. It received a $1.1M grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund this work. Michael Heltzen is CEO of Cardea Bio. Cardea Bio develops molecular biology instrumentation that leverages semiconductor technology to analyze biological samples. The company is based in San Diego. On January 12, 2021, Cardea Bio announced it raised an additional $6.5M in its Series A. The new tranche was led by 3E Bioventures Capital and included participation from existing investors. The announcement said the funding brings the Series A total to $20M. No operating metrics or other financial details were disclosed in the article. Cardea Bio builds a Tech+Bio infrastructure and chipsets based on proprietary Graphene-based Biology-gated Transistors (Cardean Transistors). Its CRISPR-Chip chipset uses CRISPR as the transistor gate to search genomes and displays results live without PCR/DNA amplification. The company positions its chipsets to stream multi-omics data in near real time, enabling new applications across health, agriculture, diagnostics, environmental monitoring, and more. Cardea runs an Innovation Partnership Program through which hundreds of companies have expressed interest in product development over the past 18 months. The company reported the first closing of an A2 financing and intends to use the capital to accelerate development of its Tech+Bio infrastructure and partner chipsets. Cardea expects the first "Powered by Cardea" products to launch in 2020 and 2021. Cardea Bio develops and commercially manufactures graphene-based digital biosensor hardware, software, and molecular infrastructure, sold under the Cardea Nanomed brand. Its ultra-sensitive graphene sensors directly measure and instantly digitize binding interactions in biological systems, leveraging graphene's stability in water and air to detect electronic-state changes when biomolecules bind. Pharmaceutical companies have been early adopters, using Cardea's platform to evaluate binding properties of therapeutic candidates and provide expert feedback on the core technology. The company plans to use the $7.8 million Series A-1 financing to grow its team and initiate strategic collaborations through the Cardea Innovation Partnership Program to co-develop and commercialize new applications. Cardea intends to establish partnerships across agricultural, industrial, and clinical research settings to expand use cases and drive product commercialization. The company is headquartered in San Diego and emphasizes replacing complex reagents and optics with portable direct electrical detection to speed time-to-results and improve sensitivity.