QuantumSi Raises $50M

QuantumSi raised additional $50M on Friday. This isn’t entirely surprising, their recent pitch/shift to “chip-less” instruments was probably at least in part about stirring up interest.

While QuantumSi isn’t starting the development of this new “chip-less” approach from scratch there I suspect there are still substantial challenges. In building out this system.

$50M is on the low side of what you’d generally expect to spend bringing up a new sequencing platform. And given they appear to have done significant engineering work already perhaps this will be enough to get them to launch.

There are two big open questions however:

• Will they be ahead of the competition in this space, who are already working on optical approaches?

• Even if they deliver, is a high throughput version of what they have compelling enough?

Neither of these questions has a particularly clear answer. But at least we will get a chance to see how their proposed strategy plays out which should be interesting!