microfluidics
(9)
Cytovale
Cytovale is a San Francisco-based medical diagnostics company that built IntelliSep, an FDA-cleared blood test that helps emergency departments identify patients at risk of sepsis in about eight minutes. Instead of hunting for a pathogen, the test reads the immune response by measuring the biomechanical properties of white blood cells using microfluidic deformability cytometry, high-speed imaging and machine learning. Founded on academic research that began in 2007 and incorporated in 2013, the company is applying its rapid host-response platform to one of medicine's most time-sensitive and deadly conditions.
Harae Dx Corp.
Harae Dx Corp. is a Pleasanton, California medical device startup building what it calls the world's smallest portable, automated system for early cancer detection. Founded in 2021 by serial medtech entrepreneur Sanjeev Saxena, the company pairs a proprietary lab-on-a-disc centrifugal microfluidic platform with a biomarker panel exclusively licensed from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to deliver a non-invasive early breast cancer test that returns results in roughly 30 minutes - without shipping samples to a third-party lab. Backed by SOSV/HAX and Fusion Fund, Harae Dx aims to make low-cost cancer screening portable enough to run at the point of care.
Portal Biotechnologies
Portal Biotechnologies is a Watertown, Massachusetts cell-engineering platform company building tools that push complex cargo - mRNA, siRNA, CRISPR complexes, proteins - into living cells by squeezing them through microscopic holes in a silicon surface, rather than relying on viruses or chemistry. Founded in 2023 by Armon Sharei, the MIT-trained scientist behind SQZ Biotechnologies, Portal sells hardware and consumables to drug discovery and cell therapy labs instead of developing its own drugs. Its instruments are used across more than 100 customer sites, including many of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, and the company has raised seed and follow-on funding plus a DARPA contract for portable, point-of-care cell manufacturing.
Shennon Biotechnologies
Shennon Biotechnologies is a San Francisco biotech turning immune-cell target discovery from a months-long slog into a same-day job. Its proprietary TCELERATOR platform fuses ultra-high-throughput microfluidics with AI to functionally profile millions of single immune cells in hours, pinpointing the rare T and B cells that recognize cancer antigens. Founded in 2021 by physicist-turned-founder Li Sun, the company is building a pipeline of validated targets for solid tumors and autoimmune disease, backed by a $13M seed round led by DCVC.
Boston Micro Fabrication (BMF)
Boston Micro Fabrication (BMF) builds 3D printers that work at a scale most machines can't reach - resolutions down to 2 microns with tolerances of about plus or minus 10 microns. Its microArch printers use a proprietary process called Projection Micro Stereolithography (PuSL) to make tiny, complex parts for medical devices, microfluidics, optics, connectors and semiconductor packaging. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Maynard, Massachusetts, BMF has placed machines with more than 2,000 customers across roughly 35 countries.
CellFE
CellFE is an Alameda, California biotechnology company building microfluidics-based, non-viral cell-engineering instruments and consumables. Its Ryva mechanoporation platform squeezes cells through microfluidic channels to transiently open their membranes and deliver gene-editing payloads (mRNA, CRISPR-RNP, DNA vectors) in under 10 milliseconds, aiming to preserve cell health and viability where viral vectors and electroporation fall short. The goal is to make lifesaving cell therapies such as CAR-T faster, cheaper, and more scalable to manufacture.
Triplebar
Triplebar is an Emeryville, California biotech company that pairs a high-throughput microfluidic screening platform with AI genomic models to run evolution at hyper-speed. By packing tens of millions of picoliter microreactors onto a palm-sized chip and testing thousands per second, it generates matched genotype-phenotype datasets that let partners optimize cell lines and microbial strains far faster and cheaper than conventional lab work. The platform powers products across food (precision fermentation, cultivated meat) and biopharma (biologics, cell-engaging cancer therapies).
Zafrens
Zafrens is a San Diego biotechnology company building an ultra-high-throughput single-cell platform that isolates, images, runs assays on, and sequences millions of individual cells per day. Its Z-Screen technology swaps the conventional 96-well plate for a credit-card-sized plastic chip holding 50,000 to 200,000 microwells, each with integrated imaging and multi-omic sequencing. By linking perturbation to genotype, phenotype and function at single-cell resolution, Zafrens compresses multiple stages of drug discovery into a single benchtop experiment - a 500x to 2,000x jump in the number of experiments a scientist can run at one timepoint.
Kytopen
Kytopen is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech and MIT spinout building Flowfect, a non-viral, continuous-flow platform that uses fluid flow plus electric fields to deliver mRNA, DNA and CRISPR payloads into cells. The technology aims to engineer hundreds of billions of cells in minutes, removing a major bottleneck in discovering, developing and manufacturing advanced cell therapies like CAR-T and NK-cell treatments.