Marama Labs was crowned ‘most impressive deep-tech pioneer in Europe’ at this week’s Deep Tech Demo Day, from a pool of some 180 start-ups.
Dublin’s Marama Labs this year announced the launch of its CloudSpec instrument for nanomedicine development, and according to co-founder and CEO Dr Brendan Darby, their spectroscopy device can potentially replace all UV-visible instruments, setting the industry’s “new gold standard”.
Darby had been developing the now patented CloudSpec technology since his PhD days in Prof Eric Le Ru’s group at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The two, along with Dr Matthias Meyer, later founded Marama Labs.
Run by Silicon Roundabout Ventures and Frontier Deep Tech, this year’s demo day saw finalists selected by European VCs from a pool of 180 applications from deep-tech start-ups all over Europe, which vied for the crown of “most impressive deep-tech pioneer in Europe”.
“We are thrilled to be recognised as the most innovative deep-tech company in Europe,” Darby told Siliconrepublic.com. “Being a company founded on deep fundamental scientific research, to be recognised with this award shows the value scientific innovations can bring to solving real-world problems such as accelerating RNA based therapies.”
Marama is a deep-tech company developing novel optical instruments for the life sciences industry. Marama’s flagship product, CloudSpec, allows RNA therapy developers to measure the drug concentration in their products much faster than existing methods – “in 15 seconds compared to 2 hours with existing methods”, according to Darby, who added that this “massively streamlines laboratory processes and ultimately accelerates the development of RNA-based therapies”.
The recognition is a major boost for the DCU Alpha-based Marama, which is currently in the process of raising its series A.
In late 2024, it announced that it was opening a new life sciences applications lab at Dublin City University’s innovation campus, DCU Alpha. This followed its raise of €280,000 from Enterprise Ireland to expand its operations in the country.
In addition to opening its new lab, Marama Labs also completed a €2m pre-Series A round to support CloudSpec. In total the start-up has raised around €5m to date, according to Darby.
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