Nanolive closes first financing round

Nanolive SA has successfully closed its first financing round with accrued capitalisation of CHF 2.7 M thanks to twenty-five F&F investors and its initial founding (in addition to CHF 550’000 in grants and the support of two PhD theses, infrastructure and laboratory space and filing of IP). 

The Company was incorporated in November 2013 at the EPFL Innovation Park by Dr. Yann Cotte (CEO) and Dr. Fatih Toy, following the completion of their respective PhD theses at the EPFL Microsystems laboratory of Prof. Christian Depeursinge (Head of Advisory Board). Dr. Andreas Kern and Dr. Sebastien Equis joined as Co-Founders to head the software development and hardware construction, respectively, while Charlotte Tengelin later joined to lead the marketing and business development efforts. 

Great momentum was created in the public as the company won numerous start-up competitions such as the Innovation grant EPFL, Enable grant EPFL, Venture Kick and Bioinnovation prize 2013. It has also been voted among the 20 most promising start-ups by Venture Leaders. Numerous newspaper articles have been published about the Company, for example in Le Temps, l’AGEFI, Bilan and Biotech Finances.

Nanolive has built a strong advisory board with experts in technology, business and entrepreneurship, and is supported by experienced patent agents and corporate lawyers.

Exploration of the interior of a living cell in 3D
Nanolive is in the business of research and development of new techniques for cell imaging. Its heart consists of a disruptive proprietary technology, holographic tomography: a laser-based cell tomography system combined with a powerful algorithm that, for the first time ever, allows the exploration of the interior of a living cell in 3D without modifying and thus damaging it. This discovery has been published in Nature Photonics in January 2013 and the 3D Cell Explorer is now available for pre-order.

Nanolive’s goal is to bring advanced medical imaging technologies to the public, encouraging technological progress, promoting and supporting scientific research and contributing to human well-being by assisting the development of new medical treatment. This cutting-edge technology is in the process of initiating the next leap in life science by introducing the unique opportunity to learn, observe and interact with living cells using advanced technology.

Below, left, is shown the example of a fixed fibroblast chemically stained to identify membrane (green) and nucleus (blue). To the right is the same cell imaged with Nanolive’s 3D Cell Explorer, stained only digitally. In the first case, the preparation procedure killed the cell and took more than four hours. Using Nanolive’s technology, the same result took just five minutes and would have been possible on unstained, living cells.

More examples of cell images and time-lapse movies are available on the new company website following the link: http://nanolive.ch/cell-gallery/.

Several markets are targeted with this technology, including education, research, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, diagnostics and cosmetics.

On November 25^th, Nanolive is organizing a big event to celebrate its first Birthday at Nanolive HQ. For organizational reasons you are kindly invited to register here: http://doodle.com/xamm384a6565bmay.

For more information, please, contact lisa@nanolive.ch.