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News & Insights

Oxford Technology & Innovations EIS Fund (OTIF) and co-investors participate in ONI’s $75m Series B financing

  • ONI has closed a $75m Series B financing led by US investors ARCH Venture Partners and Casdin Capital.
  • ONI is a pioneer in observing single molecules in living cells. The Company’s first product, the Nanoimager, is the world’s first desktop, super-resolution, single-molecule imaging platform capable of visualising and tracking individual molecules in complex systems such as nanoparticles, living cells and tissue with 20nm resolution.
  • The Series B funds will be used to build a product portfolio that harnesses the Company’s innovative technology to unlock new possibilities in therapeutic and diagnostic development, as well as basic life sciences research.

Oxford Investment Consultants LLP (OIC) is pleased to announce that the Oxford Technology & Innovations EIS Fund (OTIF) and its co-investors have participated in portfolio company ONI’s $75m Series B financing.

ONI is a biotechnology spinout company from the University of Oxford democratising the ability to observe single molecules in living cells with its desktop Nanoimager microscopy platform. The Company’s Series B round was led by US investors ARCH Venture Partners and Casdin Capital, and included Section 32, ARTIS Ventures, Vertical Venture Partners, Axon Ventures and private investors, including Paul Conley. Existing investors, including Oxford Science Enterprises, also participated.

Since founding, ONI has placed over 120 Nanoimagers and empowered over 650 scientists with accessible single molecule technology. The Company’s products have added unique insights to the biomedical research of its customers and accumulated more than 110 scientific publications.

Proceeds from the Series B financing will be used to grow ONI’s commercial and R&D teams in the US and Asia, driving technology adoption in those geographies. Funds will also be used to expand ONI’s portfolio of consumables and cloud-based software apps which, working together, become end-to-end automated solutions for application verticals. The first two applications are in the space of extracellular vesicles and cell therapy, especially chimeric antigen T-cell (CAR-T) therapy. In both cases, ONI brings superior sensitivity and true quantification to the detection of protein biomarkers, down to a single copy of a protein, and provides the capability to spatially and temporally resolve the position of these biomarkers with 20 nm accuracy.

This data from ONI’s platform can help biotech and pharma companies create more efficacious and better targeted therapies, while identifying spatial scales across large complex structures down to single molecules. This ability to put the building blocks of life into large scale context has the potential to generate breakthroughs across the life sciences spectrum, including neuroscience, epigenetics, virology, immuno-oncology, drug development, diagnostics and vaccine development. ONI has customers in all of these diverse biomedical areas already, and anticipates growing its customer base by releasing targeted and streamlined solutions for each field.

In addition to the new financing, ONI announced an expanded executive team. Together with founder & CEO, Bo Jing, the team now comprises:

  • Tyler Ralston, Chief Technology Officer – previously at Butterfly Network and Tesseract Health
  • Christine Nishiyama, Vice President of Operations – previously at Berkeley Lights
  • Don O’Neil, Vice President of Commercial Operations – previously at Gemini Bio
  • Ricardo Bastos, Director of Business Development – who started his career at ONI
  • Sophia Mowla, Chief Growth Officer – previously at True Search

Commenting on the investment, George Robinson, Founding Partner of OIC said, “By democratising access to cutting-edge research tools for the life sciences industry, ONI’s platform has the potential to truly transform the design of novel therapeutics and diagnostics which could save the lives of thousands. At OIC, we’d like to extend a warm welcome to our new co-investors, and are thrilled to continue our journey with ONI, which began with our investment in the Company’s Seed round in 2016.”

Further information on OIC, OTIF and ONI can be found here.