Newly-unveiled startup to speed up biotech and drug development
Dash Bio, an innovator in tech-enabled services for drug development, announced today that it has raised $6.5M in seed financing. The round was led by Freestyle Capital, with participation from Swift Ventures, LifeX Ventures, and other private investors.
Despite tremendous innovation in biotech research over the past decade – from pioneering applications of AI to major breakthroughs in mRNA and CRISPR – drug development remains slow and expensive, with new drugs costing an average of $6.7 billion and taking 12 years to get from concept to launch. That lag is driven by manual processes and legacy systems, which dramatically reduce the efficiency of clinical development and the effectiveness of the industry overall.
“Development is broken in biotech today, and we all pay the price,” says Dave Johnson, CEO and co-founder of Dash Bio and former Chief Data & AI Officer at Moderna. “We founded Dash Bio to ensure that groundbreaking medicines reach those who need them — faster.”
Now out of stealth, Dash Bio takes a technology-first approach to developing critical services across the drug development lifecycle. The company is building new capabilities that leverage AI, robotics, and fully-integrated software to fundamentally reinvent the way drugs are brought to market. Their first capability is a highly-automated clinical bioanalysis lab that promises to deliver GLP-compliant services with unprecedented speed.
Dash Bio’s founding team draws from a deep well of knowledge in this space. Founders include Dave Johnson (CEO), former Chief Data & AI Officer at Moderna; Ander Tallett (COO), CEO and founder of DigitalRadius and an experienced executive with stints at Moderna and Science Exchange; and Ely Porter, CTO and co-founder of Rootpath, a pioneer in synthetic immunology and gene synthesis.
“With the advancements of AI and quantum among other technologies, we are seeing huge advancements in drug discovery and expect that only to continue, but feel that the path from discovery through development to make drugs patient ready is still very antiquated and untouched by technology. We knew this was the team to tackle that challenge and you rarely find a team as deep in both AI and bio as this founding team,” says Maria Palma, General Partner at Freestyle Capital.
“We’re living through a golden age of biotech and drug discovery, but the reality is that the process for getting a drug to market threatens to slow progress. Dash Bio promises a new era of faster clinical drug development that meets the moment,” notes Brett Wilson, General Partner at Swift Ventures.
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