Moleculent, a life sciences company based in Stockholm, has closed a $20 million financing round to advance its work on cell-cell communication inside human tissue. The company was co-founded by Olle Ericsson, PhD, alongside a team of scientists and engineers. Its core focus is what it calls functional profiling: a method for measuring, at scale, how cells signal to one another directly within clinical tissue samples.
Biology research has a long-standing gap. For decades, scientists could identify where cells sit in a tissue and which proteins they produce. What they could not do was observe how one cell actively sends a signal to another, the kind of molecular exchange that governs immune responses, tumor behavior, and disease progression. That inability has real consequences. It limits what researchers can understand about why certain patients respond to cancer treatment while others do not. The spatial biology market, which covers tools for mapping molecular activity in tissue, was valued at around $1.79 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach $2.88 billion by 2030, according to Research and Markets.
Rubicon Healthcare Partners led the round, with ARCH Venture Partners, Eir Ventures, and other existing investors also participating.
Spatial biology tools have improved considerably in recent years, but most of them track location and gene activity. They do not capture the actual exchange of signals between cells. Cell-cell interactions work through surface proteins called receptors and ligands: one cell presents a ligand, another receives it through a matching receptor, and a biological signal passes between them. Detecting that process inside intact tissue, across many interaction types at once, requires a fundamentally different kind of tool.
Moleculent's platform is built around a technique called Proximity Ligation Assay. This method detects receptor-ligand interactions directly in tissue and can measure many of them at the same time, a capability described as high-plex. In cancer research, that matters a great deal. A tumor contains dozens of interacting cell types, and the signaling between them influences how a cancer grows and whether a given drug can stop it. Pharmaceutical companies developing targeted therapies need to measure those signals in real tissue, not in controlled cell cultures that strip away the biological environment entirely.
"We have evaluated platforms across the life sciences tools landscape for years, and Moleculent stands out as truly category-defining," said Ole Dahlberg, Managing Partner at Rubicon Healthcare Partners and newly appointed member of Moleculent's Board of Directors. "The company's approach to directly mapping cell-cell communication has the potential to transform how researchers study disease and develop therapies. The science, the team, and the early traction with world-class research partners gave us the conviction to lead this round."
The funding is directed at three areas. The first is expanding Techstart, Moleculent's Early Access Program, which gives selected academic institutions and biopharma companies access to the platform before its full commercial release. Partners are already active in both Europe and the United States, and the company says demand has prompted it to broaden the program sooner than originally planned.
The second priority is building out commercial operations in the United States, where most of the major pharmaceutical and biotech research centers are concentrated. Third, the capital will support the commercial launch of Moleculent's automated instrument. The instrument is designed to let research labs run large studies with consistent results and limited hands-on time, making the platform practical for groups without deep technical specialization.
"The market is telling us it's ready," said Olle Ericsson, PhD, Co-Founder and CEO of Moleculent. "We are seeing surging demand from leading research institutions and pharmaceutical partners across both Europe and the US. With Rubicon joining ARCH and Eir Ventures, we now have a syndicate of builders with successful track records of scaling life science companies from breakthrough technology to global impact."
Moleculent was founded in Stockholm and remains headquartered at Scheeles Väg 1 in Solna, Sweden. The company was built around a team of scientists and engineers focused on biological discovery tools. Its platform is designed to add what it calls a functional layer to tissue biology: going beyond identifying cells to capturing how they interact.
The platform combines two things in a single workflow. It detects direct cell-cell interactions using the Proximity Ligation Assay, while simultaneously identifying cell types through individual protein detection. That combination gives researchers both structural and functional information about the tissue at once. Moleculent is also developing an automated instrument to make this workflow accessible to translational research labs that need reproducibility across multiple study sites without specialized operators at each one.
The Techstart program already includes academic and biopharma partners. One is Nigel Jamieson, Professor of Pancreatic and Liver Surgery at the University of Glasgow, an inaugural participant in the program:
"For years, we've been able to see where cells are and what they express, but we couldn't see how they actually talk to each other in the tissue," said Nigel Jamieson, Professor of Pancreatic and Liver Surgery at the University of Glasgow, and an inaugural Techstart partner. "Moleculent changes that completely—this is the kind of tool that reshapes entire research programs."
Rubicon Healthcare Partners, a Nordic private equity firm, led the $20 million financing. The firm focuses on growth-stage companies that provide tools, technologies, and services to the life sciences sector, with a particular interest in products that reduce the time and cost of drug development.
ARCH Venture Partners and Eir Ventures both joined the round as returning investors, having backed Moleculent in earlier stages. No previous funding rounds were publicly detailed in the sources available. As part of the deal, Ole Dahlberg, Managing Partner at Rubicon Healthcare Partners, joined the Moleculent Board of Directors. Dahlberg has more than 20 years of experience in life sciences management across start-ups and larger companies. He has held roles at Life Technologies and Qiagen, and previously led Cell Biology and Sample Preparation at Thermo Fisher Scientific.
