seqWell has announced the close of a $9M Series B financing round with the goal of rapidly expanding its portfolio of genomics products into new areas such as single-cell genomics and transcriptomics. The company continues to drive its plexWell™ multiplexed library prep product offerings in growing markets such as high-throughput low-pass and targeted genotyping. The new investment round was led by Research Corporation Technologies (RCT), joined by the BroadOak Fund and current investors.
Chad Souvignier, Vice President and investment lead at RCT added in a statement, "RCT is excited about seqWell and their cutting-edge library prep tools. We believe the plexWell technology is simple, fast, and provides the high performance needed to better enable high volume genomic applications, such as single-cell sequencing."
The company is also pleased to announce the appointment of genomics industry pioneer and entrepreneur Paul McEwan as Board Chairman, effective as of January 2020. Mr. McEwan joins the company having co-founded both Kapa Biosystems and Agencourt Bioscience, and most recently served as Vice President, Lifecycle Leader at Roche Sequencing Solutions.
Mr. McEwan stated, "I am excited to help the seqWell team capitalize on the plexWell technology. plexWell's simple multiplexing workflow solves an important bottleneck for customers processing large numbers of cells and other samples."
In order to support the growing need for scalable and cost-effective library prep workflows for cutting-edge applications, seqWell is significantly expanding its research and development team at its Beverly, MA facilities. The company is also expanding its commercial team to take advantage of the B2B and OEM partnership opportunities.
"Our customers are in increasing need for integrated and scalable workflows for high-throughput genomic applications," said seqWell CEO Joseph Mellor, adding "with this funding seqWell will be able to deliver the next generation of these solutions to drive new research and applications in sequencing."
