Haga Bioscience raises $2.3M in oversubscribed seed round to bridge spatial biomarker discovery and clinical translation

What's the deal? Stockholm-based Haga Bioscience has closed an oversubscribed seed round of SEK 20.9M (roughly $2.3M), bringing its total funding to about $3M including pre-seed capital. The company will use the money to commercialise its spatial biology tools, which are designed to validate RNA biomarkers found in tissue samples and move them toward clinical use.

Almi Invest, Life Science InvestDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and SU Ventures led the round, joined by life science industry veterans, family offices, and private investors.

Founded in 2024, Haga Bioscience builds next-generation in situ hybridisation methods that can detect single nucleotide variants on RNA directly in tissue. Its co-founders include Hower LeeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → (chief executive officer), Marco Grillo (chief scientific officer), and Mats Nilsson, a professor at Stockholm University. Several team members previously worked at 10x Genomics; two of them co-founded CartanaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a SciLifeLab spinout that 10x Genomics acquired in 2020.

Why now? Spatial biology has made it possible to discover vast numbers of tissue-based RNA biomarkers, but validating those findings across large patient cohorts remains expensive and slow. "Discovery is no longer the bottleneck," said Nilsson. "The next major step for the field is translating and validating these discoveries at scale and ultimately into clinical use."

The company launched an early access programme at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute symposium on May 20, 2026, offering two products: HAGA Pattern, a multiplexed spatial gene expression assay, and HAGA Point, a spatial assay for in situ variant detection on RNA.

What could go wrong? Haga Bioscience is entering a market where established players like 10x Genomics already operate at scale. Convincing clinical researchers to adopt a new platform — especially one from a two-year-old startup — will require robust validation data and competitive pricing. The $3M war chest is modest for a company trying to commercialise hardware-adjacent biotech products.

The signal: The team's lineage is notable — several co-founders built the in situ sequencing technology at Cartana that 10x Genomics acquired in 2020 and turned into its Xenium platform, meaning Haga Bioscience's founders know first-hand where the incumbent's offering ends and clinical needs begin. Lead investor Almi Invest, a Swedish government-backed fund, frequently anchors early-stage life science rounds in the Nordics, and its involvement alongside dedicated life science fund Life Science Invest suggests the bet here is less on platform novelty and more on the translation gap that discovery-focused players have yet to close.

Read more: Biotech Newswire