Dash Bio, a Boston startup using robotics and software to speed up drug development, has raised $30 million in Series A funding. The company was co-founded by Dave Johnson, who previously served as Chief Data and AI Officer at Moderna. Dash Bio is going after one of the oldest problems in pharmaceutical development: the slow, manual process of testing biological samples to determine whether a drug is safe and effective. That process is called bioanalysis, and it remains largely unchanged despite advances elsewhere in the industry.
Bringing a new drug to market is a long and costly effort. On average, it takes 10 to 15 years and costs between $1.3 billion and $2.6 billion, according to industry estimates. Artificial intelligence has started to shorten the early stages of drug discovery, helping researchers find promising compounds more quickly. But once a drug enters the development phase, where it must be tested and validated in labs, the work slows down. Bioanalysis sits right in the middle of that bottleneck. Most of it is still done by hand, and results can take months to come back.
Oak HC/FT, a venture and growth equity firm focused on healthcare and fintech, led the round. Existing investors Freestyle Capital and Swift Ventures also participated. The raise brings Dash Bio's total funding to $47.5 million.
The market for bioanalytical testing services is large and expanding. According to Fortune Business Insights, it was valued at roughly $5.36 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $12.72 billion by 2034, growing at a compound annual rate of about 10%. Several forces are driving that growth: more pharmaceutical research, increasingly complex biologic drugs, and tighter regulatory requirements for testing. At the same time, more drugmakers are outsourcing this work to contract research organizations, or CROs, which makes the speed and quality of those outside labs a bigger factor than ever.
The problem is that many of these labs still operate the way they did decades ago. According to the company, the bioanalysis market "still runs on manual labor and paper records," with data often returned months after samples are sent in. For the pharmaceutical and biotech companies paying for this work, those delays add time and cost to an already expensive process.
"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." — Andy Smith, Partner at Oak HC/FT
Dash Bio intends to use the funding across several areas. The company will expand its commercial operations and grow its lab capacity. It also plans to offer a wider range of assays (standardized lab tests) and move into new testing categories, though it has not said which ones.
A large part of the capital will go toward the company's proprietary software platform. That software coordinates the robotics in the lab and provides end-to-end digital traceability, meaning every step of the sample testing process is recorded digitally. This stands in contrast to the paper-based tracking still common at traditional CROs.
The company says it has gained traction quickly. Since launching commercial efforts about nine months ago, Dash Bio has signed contracts with more than 30 customers, including four of the world's top 15 pharmaceutical companies. Speed and transparent pricing are the two reasons customers most often cite for choosing the company, according to Dash Bio.
Dash Bio was founded in 2024 and is based in Boston, Massachusetts. Its three co-founders all have backgrounds that span biotechnology and technology infrastructure. CEO Dave Johnson spent nine years at Moderna, where he built the digital and informatics systems that supported the company as it scaled to producing billions of vaccine doses per year. COO Ander Tallett also worked at Moderna before founding DigitalRadius, a consulting firm. Chief Scientific Officer Ely Porter previously co-founded Rootpath, a company focused on synthetic immunology and gene synthesis.
The company runs a 24,000-square-foot laboratory built for automated bioanalysis. Instead of relying on technicians to run tests manually, Dash Bio uses robotics paired with a custom laboratory operating system. The platform supports several widely used testing methods, including ELISA, MSD, qPCR, ddPCR, and LC-MS. These are techniques for measuring proteins, nucleic acids, and small molecules in biological samples.
"Sponsors and patients can't wait. We built Dash on a deep conviction: 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. Everything about how we operate, from our tech-first approach to our transparent, fixed pricing, is built to serve that goal, and ultimately to get medicines to patients faster." — Dave Johnson, Co-founder and CEO of Dash Bio
Oak HC/FT led the $30 million Series A. The firm was founded in 2014 and focuses on healthcare and fintech investments. It has invested in 100 portfolio companies and manages more than $7 billion in assets. Oak HC/FT is based in Stamford, Connecticut, with an office in San Francisco.
Freestyle Capital and Swift Ventures, both returning investors, also joined the round. Before this Series A, Dash Bio had raised $17.5 million across earlier rounds, including a $6.5 million seed round in October 2024 led by Freestyle Capital with participation from Swift Ventures and LifeX Ventures. With the new round, Dash Bio's total funding stands at $47.5 million.
