BiomeSense raises $3 million in funding round

US biotech company BiomeSense has announced the close of its oversubscribed $3 million (£2.4 million) funding round.

The round was led by Bluestein Ventures, the financing includes new investor Harvest Ridge Capital along with participation from existing investors SOSV and Seerave Foundation,

The new financing will support BiomeSense’s commercial launch, expected within the year.

BiomeSense Co-Founder and CEO, Kevin Honaker, said:

“Multiple studies have shown the microbiome is the portal to overall health and wellness, including the ability to predict a person’s response to a particular medicine and helping patients better manage conditions such as diabetes or celiac disease.

“While we know these possibilities exist, data barriers have blocked the industry from fully harnessing the microbiome’s potential.

“Now, thanks to our funders’ confidence, we can launch our technology and access the microbiome’s full precision medicine promise.”

BiomeSense is developing dedicated tools to help fully unlock microbiome precision medicine.

Its “smart bathroom” technology, GutLab, and bioinformatics platform, MetaBiome, aim to make generating and analysing large-scale, time-series microbiome datasets both possible and cost-effective.

BiomeSense is partnering with scientists to deploy the platform across a range of clinical studies to create the industry’s first curated time-series microbiome database.

This resource ‘will set new standards for microbiome precision medicine, from basic research through commercial product development,’ the company said in a press release.

Andrew Bluestein, Managing Partner at Bluestein Ventures and BiomeSense board director, said:

“As an early investor in BiomeSense, we have always believed deeply in the company’s vision to unlock personalised nutrition via the gut microbiome.

“The company has made immense progress since our initial investment, and we are proud to support BiomeSense as it enters this critical commercialisation phase.

“There is a significant measurement gap in the industry and the expected benefits from BiomeSense’s technology are enormous.”