BERKELEY, Calif — Correlia Biosystems, a Berkeley, CA based life science startup, announced today that it has closed a $7 million Series A financing round with select global investors. Neotribe Ventures led the investment round, joined by Cota Capital, the Regents of the University of California, and others. This funding enables commercial launch of Correlia’s next-generation immunoassay platform. This will be the first instrument planned in their larger suite of proteomics tools focused on highly efficient and automated protein measurements.

“We’ve had great traction this past year as we secured pilots with 5 top global pharma companies and also won the Ignite award for the most innovative startup technology at the 2020 SLAS conference,” said CEO Akwasi Apori. “With this new funding round, we are poised to bring our unique, more granular, assay capabilities to customers who have been waiting for major advances in the 50-year old ELISA market.”

Correlia’s first product miniaturizes ELISA—a quantitative test for proteins and antibodies widely used in drug development, vaccine development and diagnostics. The current pandemic highlights the importance of faster and more efficient diagnostic tests, and the need to develop vaccines and therapeutics in a timely fashion. Proteomics assays, like ELISA, represent a growing and complimentary market to genomics. Many emerging proteomics applications are also becoming increasingly data intensive, such as those used in pre-clinical drug development and tumor micro-biopsy profiling.

By combining advances in nanomaterials, automation, and lab-on-a-chip technology, Correlia has developed a proteomics platform that generates orders of magnitude more data per given sample volume and time. Traditional ELISA tests require hours to perform a complex and laborious workflow. In contrast, Correlia’s platform uses less than one microliter of sample to run rapid, automated assays. This increased performance efficiency opens new opportunities for researchers to expand ELISA based assays in areas where sample volume is a bottleneck, or when fast turn-around times are critical.

NeoTribe Ventures joins Correlia’s board of directors as part of the financing. “Neotribe was founded to invest in founders working on complex and deeply impactful problems. We are excited to join Correlia’s journey to create a category-creating new standard for ultra-efficient and highly automated protein biomarker measurement,” said Swaroop ‘Kittu’ Kolluri, founder and managing director or Neotribe and former general partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA).