Aventix raises €1.2 million pre-seed to build the future of bioanalytics
AI-powered volume measurement in 30 seconds – contactless
Aventix AB, a bioanalytics company building sensor-based analytical tools for laboratories, announced it has raised €1.2 million in pre-seed financing. The company is founded by serial entrepreneurs Erik Gatenholm and Hector Martinez, who previously co-founded CELLINK, later BICO Group. The €1.2 million round was led by Kost Capital and Voima Ventures. GU Ventures invested in Aventix prior to the round. Separately, Vinnova and Västra Götalandsregionen have provided capital support for the development of the technology platform.
Aventix
The funding will support the commercial rollout of Aventix’s first product, Scarlett 01, through its Early Access Program in North America and Europe, the expansion of its applications and software teams, and the development of additional analytical capabilities on the underlying sensor platform.
Laboratories generate more experimental data every year, and comparatively little of it is structured or verified well enough to train and validate AI models. One critical area, and the company’s first application, is liquid handling quality. A dispensed volume that is even a few percent off target shifts compound concentration, affects assay reproducibility and influences every conclusion downstream, often without anyone noticing until the experiment fails.
Scarlett 01 delivers volume analytics for every well of a microplate without contacting the sample. It uses Aventix Chromatic Core Technology (ACCT), an optical method that turns chromatic aberration — ordinarily a defect — into a ruler made of light. Each wavelength comes to a focal point at a precisely calibrated distance, and the wavelength reflected most strongly encodes the height of the liquid surface. Aventix’s SensVue AI-powered software converts the measured surface geometry into a volume for each well, accounting for meniscus curvature and plate geometry.
A full 96-well plate can be measured in as little as 30 seconds.
In an independent validation study with VTT MIKES, the National Metrology Institute of Finland, Scarlett measured 10 µL dispensed volumes of DMSO in a 384-well microplate. The reference syringe was gravimetrically calibrated by RISE Research Institutes of Sweden according to ISO 8655 methods at 10.12 µL ± 0.07 µL (95% confidence).
Leadership perspectives
“We are living in a remarkable time for the scientific community. The pace of scientific discovery is accelerating, but progress will increasingly depend on how effectively we can collect and analyse accurate data to develop, train and apply AI models. Together with a brilliant team, we are approaching some of science’s most difficult problems from a new direction, with the aim of making data collection and analytics faster, smarter and more cost-effective. We are proudly building the technology and company here in Sweden. This financing enables us to take Aventix to the next level and put our technology into the hands of scientists around the world.” — Erik Gatenholm, Co-Founder and CEO, Aventix
“Data collection is the real bottleneck in AI-based analytics. We address it by coupling foundational measurements with optical data and images under a layer of AI models and analytics. We started with volume because everything built on top of that measurement inherits its uncertainty. Scarlett makes that invisible error visible, in seconds, without touching the sample.” — Hector Martinez, Co-Founder and CTO, Aventix
“Bioanalytics is one of the biggest untapped opportunities to build the measurement infrastructure behind better, healthier products, and Scarlett 01 is only the first proof point of what that platform can become. We’ve followed Aventix since inception, and we couldn’t be more excited to back Erik, Hector and the team as they build it.” — Bodil Siden, General Partner, Kost Capital
“What really stood out to us about Aventix is the combination of an exceptional team and a technology platform with potential far beyond its first application. Erik and Hector have a proven ability to build and scale ambitious companies, and we believe Aventix can become a real game-changer in life science tools. We’re excited to be part of the journey.” — Stina Wallmark, Investment Director, Voima Ventures
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