The company will use the capital to initiate commercialization of its spatial biology technologies designed specifically for validation and translational workflows, it states.

The financing included participation from Almi Invest, Life Science Invest, and SU Ventures, alongside undisclosed life science industry veterans, family offices, and private investors.

New possibilities for translational research

The company’s technologies enable sensitive, specific detection of single nucleotide variants (SNVs) on RNA directly in situ, and are built on next-generation in situ hybridization methods developed by co-founders Hower Lee (CEO), Marco Grillo (CSO), and Mats Nilsson, professor at Stockholm University and scientific co-founder of the company.

Additional co-founders include Malte Kuhnemund, Daniel Gyllborg, and Xiaoyan Qian, previously at 10x Genomics. Kuhnemund and Qian co-founded Cartana in 2017, a SciLifeLab spinout whose in situ RNA sequencing technology was acquired by 10x Genomics in 2020 and integrated into the Xenium platform.

“Until now, the field has lacked robust in situ variant calling on FFPE tissue samples with high sensitivity and specificity,” says Hower Lee, co-founder and CEO of Haga Bioscience. “Addressing this challenge enables new possibilities for translational research.”

“Discovery is no longer the bottleneck,” said Mats Nilsson, professor at Stockholm University and scientific co-founder of Haga Bioscience. “The next major step for the field is translating and validating these discoveries at scale and ultimately into clinical use. That is precisely what HAGA.BIO aims to enable.”