Just over four months after expanding into a new, larger facility, BioFlyte, an Albuquerque biothreat surveillance startup, announced Thursday it raised $5.4 million to expand the reach of its biosecurity products.
Founded in 2020 as a spin-off of Maryland-based biodefense and medical device company ZeteoTech, BioFlyte has a pair of products to identify biological threats. Those products are designed to keep different locations — from train stations to concert halls to federal office buildings — safe from harmful toxins, viruses and bacteria like anthrax and ricin.
The technology behind those products also incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect, characterize and store biological species to identify those toxins more quickly.
The $5.4 million investment constitutes BioFlyte's Series B funding round — a larger investment round used to scale proven companies that have closed Series A rounds — and would help the startup expand its manufacturing operations. It would also be used to "create a sales organization to drive market penetration and support our growing customer base," Todd Sickles, BioFlyte's CEO, said in today's news release.
"It's both [an] evolution of current product marketing roles into account management roles as we get more instruments into the market, as well as building a sales organization designed to scale our penetration within key strategic segments," Sickles wrote in an email to Albuquerque Business First.
BioFlyte brought on Bill Rule, a former supply chain and manufacturing engineering consultant, as its vice president of manufacturing in March, around the same time the startup moved into a new 5,300-square-foot corporate facility at the Sandia Science and Technology Park. Thanks to the investment, more hiring could be on the way. Sickles told Business First BioFlyte hopes to add four to five positions by the end of the year, including a vice president of engineering and a manufacturing test engineer.
Sickles wrote in the email to Business First that generating repeat sales in key market segments, including mail screening facilities and airports, will be key to BioFlyte's growth. So too will be proving out the reliability of the startup's bioaerosol detection technology through "strategic onsite evaluations," he wrote.
The startup opened its Series B round last fall and closed it in June, Sickles wrote. Scout Ventures, a frontier tech-focused VC firm based in Austin, and Santa Fe-based Cottonwood Technology Fund led the round. The New Mexico Vintage Fund, a generalist microfund launched in the state just over a year ago, also invested.
BioFlyte announced a $6 million Series A investment round April 2022, led by Cottonwood Technology Fund and Anzu Partners, an early-stage VC firm based in Washington, D.C.
Although the startup isn't currently planning another raise, Sickles wrote in the email, "one might occur later next year."
