Split Biosciences, now Parse Biosciences, Announces $7M in Series A Funding to Democratize Single-Cell RNA Sequencing

As adoption of scRNA-seq in industry and academia accelerates, Parse Biosciences (formerly Split Bio) offers the most flexible and scalable single cell sequencing kit, no custom instrument needed

Seattle, WA, January 26, 2021

Split Biosciences, a company providing researchers scalable and flexible single cell sequencing solutions, today announced $7M in Series A funding. The funding round was led by Bioeconomy Capital, an early stage VC firm specializing in companies developing life science tools, with participation from new and existing angel investors. Split Bio also announced a rebrand of the company to Parse Biosciences.

The new funding will be used to continue scaling the commercial roll-out of Parse Bioscience’s Whole Transcriptome Kit, which enables researchers to profile up to 100,000 cells in parallel across up to 48 samples. In addition to increased scalability, Parse Biosciences’s technology also provides researchers with higher data quality. Parse enables researchers to increase gene detection in individual cells, while dramatically reducing confounding artifacts that are common in single cell sequencing experiments.

The new brand comes as Parse Biosciences matures beyond the initial academic research upon which the company was founded and in the wake of significant advancements in their technology.

“We have spent the last three years developing a product that more scientists could actually use,” said Charlie Roco, co-founder and CTO of Parse Biosciences. “Our kits are now operating at a higher level than anything else we’ve seen on the market and our company has evolved beyond our original SPLiT-seq method. We wanted our brand to reflect that.”

Researchers in both the pharmaceutical industry and academia have increasingly leveraged single cell technologies to drive discovery. Single cell RNA sequencing continues to transform research across every field of biology and medicine, and the pace of adoption shows no sign of slowing down, with the global single-cell analysis market expected to continue growing at a CAGR of 18% through 2027.

Through single cell sequencing, researchers are able to interrogate biological systems through a new lens, leading to insights that were previously obscured without single cell resolution. To date, however, researchers are limited in their options. While other single cell sequencing solutions on the market require expensive lab equipment, Parse Biosciences has developed a technique that enables single cell sequencing with only basic lab equipment. By removing the most prohibitive barrier to access, the company’s kits help bring single cell sequencing to virtually every research lab around the world.

“From the sheer scalability of their technology, to the entirely unique flexibility that their single cell sequencing kits provides to researchers, Parse Biosciences is creating a new standard for the single cell market,” said Rob Carlson, managing director at Bioeconomy Capital. “We’re excited to back this emerging leader of the industry and support their continued expansion to serve labs all over the world.”

Parse Biosciences enables researchers to scale their single-cell sequencing and achieve more flexible workflows. By using combinatorial cDNA barcoding within cells themselves, Parse Biosciences’s technology allows researchers to eliminate the need for complex and expensive microfluidic instruments. Additionally, the company’s technology enables samples to be fixed, frozen and stored, allowing researchers to separate out the sample extraction from downstream library preparation steps. This capability empowers researchers to run fixed samples collected on different dates together in a single experiment, providing greater control over sample handling and reducing handling errors.

Parse Biosciences’ Whole Transcriptome Kit is already used in 40 labs across the country, providing these researchers with improved resolution and throughput in their experiments. The company also supplies a computational pipeline which generates an experimental report along with a gene-cell count matrix and other processed data that integrates into existing open source tools, such as Seurat and Scanpy.

“At Parse Biosciences, we believe broad and widespread access to tools to understand biology is critical to solving the most pressing health challenges of our generation, from eradicating infectious diseases, to developing successful targeted therapies,” said Alex Rosenberg, CEO and co-founder of Parse Biosciences. “We know that, as a technology, single cell sequencing holds the key to accelerating progress in human health and scientific research. We’re excited to have Bioeconomy Capital’s support as we continue to scale our offerings to researchers and provide labs with an effective and flexible new technology to support their critical work.”