Date: Oct 21, 2011 Author: Rodney H Brown Source: bizjournals (
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by Rodney H. Brown
Article updated as of 11:08 a.m., Oct. 21, 2011.
Firefly BioWorks Inc., a Cambridge biotech startup, has taken in $1.99 million in a new funding round that saw participation by 18 unnamed backers, company officials confirmed.
The funding is the first institutional round for Firefly, and follows closely on the heels of a $2 million SBIR contract the company won in August from the National Cancer Institute to validate its microRNA assay technology and expand production capacity.
The 18 investors in Firefly's first round were not named in the filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to CEO Davide Marini, the early stage startup was previously funded by a combination of angel investors who put in a $1 million round early on. Firefly now has about seven employees, including a couple of co-op students from Northeastern University. "We rely very heavily on Northeastern and their co-op program," Marini said.
Marini said the next stage for the company is to have its biomarker platform move into beta testing, primarily in research labs. "Our long-term plan is to be a diagnostics company, but for the moment we are focusing exclusively on the research market because we need to demonstrate the robustness of the platform," he said.
Firefly BioWorks was founded in 2009 by MIT researcher Patrick Doyle and Daniel Pregibon. Doyle, whose lab developed the technology, sits on the company's science advisory board and Pregibon acts as Firefly BioWorks' CTO. Also listed on the company's website as a co-founder is Davide Marini, Firefly BioWorks' CEO. The company's first line of products will be encoded hydrogel microparticles that can be read on standard flow cytometers, microarray readers and fluorescence microscopes.
Firefly moved into its current location at One Kendall Square in Cambridge earlier this year. The company was noted as one of Mass High Tech's "Startup Watch: Five you should follow" companies in late August.
