The company plans to use the funding to support its flagship product in the mRNA therapeutics market.
New Zealand and Ireland-based start-up Marama Labs has opened a new life sciences applications lab at Dublin City University’s (DCU) innovation campus, DCU Alpha. The company also announced that it has secured €2m in funding to support the expansion of its upcoming product, CloudSpec.
On Tuesday (17 December), Marama Labs officially opened up its Irish Life Sciences Applications Lab at DCU Alpha at an event where it also announced the fundraise. The event featured a number of notable attendees, including the president of Dublin City University Prof Daire Keogh, and the executive director of life sciences at Enterprise Ireland, Jennifer Melia.
The pre-Series A funding round was led by existing investor The Yield Lab Europe, with co-investment from DeepIE Ventures, NZ Growth Capital Partners, Radar Ventures, Icehouse Ventures, Angel Investors Marlborough and other existing angel investors.
Using the newly acquired funds, Marama Labs plans to support CloudSpec in the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) therapeutics market. While the device allows winemakers to boost their decision-making by providing them with previously unavailable, quantitative chemical data, it also has applications in the life sciences industry, as it assists drug-makers in analysing opaque liquids.
According to the company, CloudSpec can assess information about new classes of therapeutics, called nanomedicines, in seconds. If successful, this would prove to be an invaluable tool to the scientific world, as the process can take existing technologies hours to interpret.
‘A pivotal moment’
Marama Labs intends to officially launch CloudSpec into the market next year, in an effort to “remove significant bottlenecks in nanomedicine development”.
The deep-tech start-up was established 2019 by Dr Brendan Darby, Dr Matthias Meyer and Prof Eric Le Ru, and originated as a spin-out of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Welcoming the opening of the new lab, Darby – who is also CEO – referred to it as “a pivotal moment” for the company.
Darby, who is also a former student of DCU, added: “Dublin provides the ideal environment to grow our team and work closely with life sciences innovators in the northern hemisphere.”
Keogh also said that DCU Alpha is “thrilled” to welcome Marama Labs, and further voiced his confidence in the company by saying that it “will undoubtedly contribute to advancing life sciences globally”.
It has been a busy year for Marama Labs – in January, the company raised €1.75m in a seed-plus funding round to develop its novel spectroscopy technology.
At the time, Marama Labs said it intended to expand its global footprint in the wine industry and launch its first product for the life sciences market in 2024.
And in September, Marama Labs announced it had secured €280,000 to expand its operations in Ireland.
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