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Karius Raises $50M in Series A Financing

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Karius has raised $50 million in a Series A financing round led by Data Collective and Lightspeed Venture Partners. New investors Tencent and Khosla Ventures, as well as existing investors Innovation Endeavors and Spectrum 28, also participated.

The Redwood City, California-based firm, which spun out from Stanford University in 2014, said it plans to use the funding to support new and ongoing clinical trials, scale up its laboratory capacity, and help commercialize its infectious disease test.

The test will combine next-generation sequencing, proprietary genomics algorithms, and machine learning to enable detection of more than 1,250 pathogens. Detection is based on identifying fragments of cell-free pathogen DNA in patients' blood.

"Clinical results from our early-access program demonstrate that the Karius test allows clinicians to diagnose infections more rapidly and accurately," Karius CEO Mickey Kertesz said in a statement. "We look forward to further broadening availability of our technology in the coming months." 

Matt Ocko, managing partner at DCVC, said in the statement that the new financing would help Karius do infectious disease testing on a "global scale."

The company has been collaborating with early-access partners, including running clinical trials with the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University, and it presented data from seven of its collaborations at the American Society for Microbiology meeting earlier this year.