Dash Bio, a Boston-based bioanalysis contract research organization pairing lab robotics with a proprietary operating system, announced a $30 million Series A on August 4, 2026 led by Oak HC/FT. The round brings the company’s total capital raised to $47.5 million and includes participation from existing investors Freestyle Capital and Swift Ventures.
A tech-first bioanalysis CRO
Dash Bio runs a 24,000-square-foot Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) compliant lab where robotics and a custom laboratory operating system handle standardized workflows across ELISA, MSD, qPCR, ddPCR and LC-MS assays. Traditional providers, the company argues, still rely on manual processes and paper records that stretch turnaround from weeks to months. Dash Bio says it can return some preclinical results in days while offering fixed pricing and digital tracking of every sample.
“Sponsors and patients can’t wait,” co-founder and CEO Dave Johnson said in the announcement. “The pace of drug development should be set by the science, not by queues and legacy process. Our goal is to push deliverable timelines to the very limits of the underlying chemistry, physics and biology.”
Backed by top pharma customers
Since beginning commercial operations about nine months ago, Dash Bio has signed contracts with more than 30 customers, including four of the world’s 15 largest pharmaceutical companies. The Series A cash will fund an expansion of commercial operations, additional laboratory capacity, more testing services, new categories and continued software development.
Oak HC/FT partner Andy Smith framed the deal around the founding team’s pedigree: “In less than two years, the Dash team has built a GLP-compliant, fully automated bioanalysis platform that the industry’s largest drug developers are already adopting. The team’s background architecting the digital and automation infrastructure at Moderna during one of the most consequential scale-ups in modern history brings a playbook and level of experience to productizing and scaling infrastructure for science that very few founders in this space can match.”
Lab automation catches fresh capital
The round lands in an active month for automation-heavy life-sciences funding. It comes on the heels of Function Health’s $450 million growth round from General Catalyst and follows Tempus AI’s $1.5 billion agreement to acquire Personalis for cancer MRD testing. On the medical-robotics side, Magnendo’s $18 million Series A from Penumbra for magnetic stroke robotics has kept clinical automation in the spotlight.
Reporting based on coverage from AI Insider, Finsmes, Pulse2 and Dash Bio.