P

Pleno

Biotech & Life Sciences · Chula Vista, United States · Founded 2017

Pleno Inc. is a biotechnology company based in San Diego, California, that is developing a multi-omic instrument platform for biological target detection. The company was founded in 2017 by Dr. Pieter van Rooyen, a serial entrepreneur with a background in electrical engineering who previously co-founded and sold Edico Genome to Illumina for $100 million in 2018. Pleno's core technology, known as Hypercoding™, combines signal processing techniques from the telecommunications industry with advanced biochemistry. This approach is designed to deliver targeted biological information, including DNA, RNA, methylation, and protein content, at a high scale and lower cost compared to existing technologies like PCR and next-generation sequencing (NGS). The company's instrument platform, named RAPTOR™, is engineered to detect up to 10,000 targets per sample and process thousands of samples per day. This capability aims to serve a wide variety of applications, such as early cancer screening, non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), pharmacogenomics, infectious diseases, and proteomics. The company's business model centers on selling the RAPTOR™ instrument and related consumables to clinical testing labs and biomedical research institutions. Pleno's goal is to make complex multi-omic testing more accessible and affordable. In August 2025, Pleno announced its first commercial agreement with Slopes Bio, which will purchase multiple RAPTOR instruments to process over 100,000 samples annually. Pleno has raised significant capital to fund its development and commercialization efforts, including a $15 million Pre-Series A in May 2022, a $40 million Series A in October 2022, and a $25 million Series B in late 2024. Key investors include Deerfield Management, Foresite Capital, and Medical Excellence Capital. As of late 2024, Dr. Vik Vaz, formerly of Illumina, serves as CEO, succeeding founder Pieter van Rooyen. Keywords: multi-omics, biological target detection, Hypercoding, RAPTOR platform, genomics, proteomics, DNA sequencing, RNA analysis, methylation detection, clinical diagnostics, biomedical research, cancer screening, pharmacogenomics, infectious disease testing, biotechnology, life sciences, molecular diagnostics, high-throughput screening, liquid biopsy, non-invasive prenatal testing