Haga Bioscience Closes $2.3M Funding Round to Commercialize Spatial Biology Tech

Editor’s Take: Validating certain classes of biomarkers across large clinical cohorts has challenges like sample throughput and high cost.

Haga Bioscience (Haga.bio), a Stockholm-based spatial biology startup, has closed a SEK 20.9 million (US$2.3 million) oversubscribed seed financing round. This brings Haga.bio’s funding to approximately US$3 million for initializing commercialization of spatial biology technologies for validation and translational workflows.

Importance of Spatial Biology

Haga.bio, founded in 2024, wants to bridge the gap between spatial RNA biomarker discovery and clinical translation. All too often, the company says, validating findings across large clinical cohorts is challenging due to sample throughput and high cost. This appears true even with advances in spatial biology that have uncovered large numbers of novel tissue-based RNA biomarkers.

According to Haga.bio, its technologies do not just enable cost-effective, scalable validation and translational workflows. They also offer sensitive and specific detection of single nucleotide variants (SNVs) on RNA, directly in situ.

Hower Lee, Haga Bioscience Co-Founder and CEO, said until now, there has been some difficulty regarding formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissue samples.

“The field has lacked robust in-situ variant calling on FFPE tissue samples with high sensitivity and specificity,” Lee said. “Addressing this challenge enables new possibilities for translational research.”

Haga Bioscience Proprietary Programs

Haga.bio is providing early access to two distinct programs. One is Haga Pattern, a multiplexed spatial gene expression assay. The other: Haga Point, a spatial assay for in-situ SNV detection on RNA.

The most recent financing supports product development, commercialization, and industry and academic collaborations.

“Discovery is no longer the bottleneck,” said Mats Nilsson, Scientific Co-Founder of Haga Bioscience. Nilsson is also a professor at Stockholm University. “The next major step for the field is translating and validating these discoveries at scale and ultimately into clinical use. That is precisely what Haga.bio aims to enable.”

Financing partners included Almi Invest, Life Science Invest, and SU Ventures, with other participants undisclosed.