Dash Bio banks $30 million to automate development bottleneck

USA-based bioanalysis firm Dash Bio has raised $30 million in a series A round led by Oak HC/FT, money it will spend on a laboratory that hands much of drug safety and efficacy testing to robots. Existing backers Freestyle Capital and Swift Ventures also took part. The round takes total funding at the Waltham, Massachusetts company to $47.5 million.

Bioanalysis is the laboratory work that measures how a drug behaves in preclinical and clinical samples, producing the data that decides whether a candidate moves forward. Dash argues the field remains stuck in an older era of manual handling and paper records, with sponsors often waiting months for results after shipping their samples.