Qvella Corporation has raised US $20 million in Series B funding co-led by Qvella’s existing investor syndicate, RA Capital Management, Whitecap Venture Partners, Hatteras Ventures, and Sands Capital Ventures, and new strategic investor bioMérieux, a world leader in the field of in vitro diagnostics.
Concurrent with the bioMérieux investment in Qvella, Frédéric Sweeney, PhD, VP of Corporate Business Development and Strategic Financing Lead at bioMérieux, will join Qvella’s Board of Directors.
In October 2015, Qvella secured US $20 million Series A funding co-led by RA Capital and Whitecap Venture Partners with participation of Hatteras Venture Partners and Sands Capital.
Richmond Hill, Ontario based Qvella intends to use new funding for clinical trials, to support on-going research and development, and to facilitate team expansion and manufacturing scale-up.
Founded in 2009, Qvella is a molecular diagnostics company that aims to dramatically reduce the time to results in the diagnosis of infections. Qvella’s highly differentiated technology for pathogen detection enables direct sampling of bodily fluids without the need for culturing or time-consuming sample processing.
“This latest round of funding provides us with the capital to support the anticipated clinical trial of our first product for rapid detection of blood stream infections directly from whole blood. It will also facilitate ongoing research and development and enable us to expand our team,” said Tino Alavie, President & CEO and co-founder of Qvella. “We have made a tremendous amount of progress since our last round of funding in 2015 and are grateful to our investors for their continued support of our vision of redefining rapid detection and subsequent treatment of septic patients.”
“This investment in Qvella highlights our commitment to addressing the growing threats of antimicrobial resistance,” said Francois Lacoste, Corporate Vice President, Clinical Unit at bioMérieux. “We have been truly impressed by the team at Qvella as well as the technology at the core of their innovation, and we believe that it could bring disruptive solutions to improve medical outcomes.”
photo credit: Qvella