Samplix Closes First €25M of Financing Round, Led by WLan

Your daily brief on leadership and business

Danish biotech Samplix has announced a €25 million first close of a financing round. Only €3 million of it is new capital. The other €22 million comes as convertible bonds from existing shareholders.

WLanholding GmbH, a privately owned European investment firm, led the round, and all major shareholders took part. The round stays open to more investors, with a total target of €30 million.

As part of the deal, Dr. Werner Lanthaler, founder and Managing Director of WLan and a former CEO of Evotec, will join the Samplix board within the next year. He will work with management on the company's next phase of growth.

"We are excited to partner with Samplix at this pivotal stage of its growth," Lanthaler said. He added that the team has built a differentiated single-cell technology platform that solves real, persistent challenges in drug discovery.

What Samplix sells

Samplix is based in Birkerød and was founded in 2013. Its Xdrop platform encloses individual living cells and assay reagents in millions of tiny double-emulsion droplets. Each droplet works as a small, self-contained reaction vessel, so researchers can observe how cells behave. The company says the droplets are compatible with standard flow cytometry and cell-sorting equipment.

Biopharma companies and academic institutions use the platform in antibody discovery, immunotherapy, cell line development and genomic editing. Samplix says it targets a chronic problem in early drug development: screening cells against hard-to-target proteins, such as those embedded in cell membranes.

The company plans to use the money to strengthen its balance sheet and widen commercial adoption of Xdrop, mainly in antibody discovery. It also sees an opening in AI-driven drug discovery, where large volumes of functional, cell-level data are needed to train predictive models.

"This is an important milestone in our mission to make drug-discovery faster, simpler, and more reliable," said CEO Dr. Henrik Pfundheller.

Source: EU-Startups