Aperiomics Inc. just secured more funding for a round it initially closed last year.
The Sterling biotech has raised another $1.2 million to bring its Series A round to a total of $3 million, on top of $1.8 million it raised in 2019. The latest capital comes from Greenville, South Carolina-based VentureSouth, which led the round, in addition to Houston, Texas-based Pipeline Angels; Atlanta Technology Angels; Danville, Virginia-based The Launch Place; Austin, Texas-based Central Texas Angel Network; and high-net-worth individuals.
Aperiomics said it’s now raising a $1 million bridge note to fund operations ahead of a planned Series B round. Naples, Florida-based Tamiami Angel Funds has already put in $300,000 toward the note and some Aperiomics executives will also invest.
“Our mission is to fundamentally shift the paradigm of infectious disease testing, so that health care providers have the most advanced tools to ensure patients do not suffer unnecessarily from treatable conditions,” Aperiomics CEO Crystal Icenhour said in a statement. “Thanks to the financial support of Aperiomics’ family of investors, our next-generation testing platform will be available to more doctors and can be integrated into the health care system as a new gold standard in diagnostic testing care, drastically improving our understanding of rare and hard-to-diagnose medical conditions caused by infection.”
Aperiomics’s original technology pinpoints causes of unsuccessfully diagnosed chronic infections. It uses genomic sequencing and machine learning to identify every known pathogen — bacteria, virus, parasite or fungus — behind mysterious illnesses using relevant samples (think: blood, urine, fecal matter, saliva and semen).
The new financing will support the company’s clinical laboratory and marketing programs to educate health care providers about it. It will also help expand the business’s Covid-19 testing capabilities, which Aperiomics has been advancing since a major pivot in March. The company is providing that diagnostic to D.C.-area universities, airlines, hotels and other businesses, it said. Aperiomics also intends to roll out new products in 2021.
It comes about nine months after Aperiomics teamed up with Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn to speed up its work on its Covid-19 testing kits, and after it separately partnered with Gaithersburg biotech Antibody Biopharm Inc. to offer a rapid antibody test for Covid-19. But the partners did not receive the Food and Drug Administration approval required to take that test to the market and are no longer advancing it, a company spokesman confirmed Monday.
The fresh funding also follows a challenging first stab at the Series A raise, which fell short of a $2 million target — and the potential to subscribe up to $4 million — in August 2019.
Icenhour, who holds a doctorate in molecular medicine, was asking investors to bet on her startup just as the controversy of Silicon Valley blood-testing company Theranos Inc. — in which millions of investor dollars were lost — came to light. That saga of a business that was proven to be fraudulent tarnished the health care diagnostic space, and Aperiomics felt the effects, Icenhour told the Washington Business Journal in January.
“I had millions of dollars literally walk away, and there was nothing I could do to save it,” she said previously. “It had nothing to do with me, it had nothing to do with my business, but we were the direct recipients of that fallout.”
So earlier this year and prior to the pandemic, she set out to change that narrative. And though the coronavirus outbreak slowed investments for many startups, Aperiomics’s work in the Covid-19 arena catalyzed its round, Icenhour said in the spring. “A lot of our existing investors have realized that this economic downturn is going to hurt a lot of their portfolio companies, so they are actively and aggressively shifting their focus away from bringing in new deals to reinvesting in their existing portfolio companies,” she said at the time.
Prior to the Series A, the business had raised $1.8 million in nondilutive government grant funding and another $512,000 in seed funding. The company said its testing has helped more than 1,200 health care providers across 24 countries since its 2014 founding.
