Irish life-sciences start-up Marama Labs secures €280,000 in funding from Enterprise Ireland to support expansion

Marama Labs, a life-sciences instrumentation start-up, has secured €280,000 in funding from Enterprise Ireland to fund the expansion of the company’s Irish operations.  Enterprise Ireland’s High Potential Start-Up (HPSU) investment is part of the company’s Q4 2023 seed-plus round led by leading Irish VC The Yield Lab Europe and brings the total funding of the round raised by Marama Labs to €2m.

The company, founded in New Zealand in 2019, is led by Irish-born CEO and co-founder Dr Brendan Darby with offices in Dublin and Wellington (New Zealand).

The investment from Enterprise Ireland will be used to fund the expansion of Marama Labs’ Irish operations, opening a commercially-focused applications lab in North Dublin and hiring a life-sciences applications team to support its customers in the Northern Hemisphere.

Dr Brendan Darby, CEO and Co-Founder of Marama Labs, said: “We are delighted to have secured investment from Enterprise Ireland as part of our recent capital raise. Ireland’s position as a leader in the global life sciences industryprovides the perfect launchpad for Marama Labs to scale our commercial footprint in the Northern Hemisphere life sciences market.

“I am personally very excited about working with Enterprise Ireland to build out our Irish activities and leverage the unique life sciences skills available in Ireland. Our mission is to become a global leader in scientific instrumentation, removing bottlenecks in the chemical analysis of liquids, enabling faster and cheaper development of life-saving products.” 

Tom Kelly, Divisional Manager, Industrial & Life Sciences at Enterprise Ireland said: “Congratulations to the team at Marama Labs on its recent investment wins. Enterprise Ireland’s HPSU investment in this highly innovative company will support its exploration into the rapidly growing life-sciences market and the expansion of its operations in Ireland.” 

Marama Labs develops novel spectroscopy technology that can rapidly analyse the chemistry of highly complex high-value liquids in industries such as life sciences and fermentation. Its CloudSpec product is able to quantify crucial quality information about new classes of therapeutics, called nanomedicines, in seconds, compared to hours it takes with existing technologies.

Marama Labs is working with some of the world’s leading therapeutic manufacturers to speed up their drug discovery and manufacturing workflows, with the life sciences product due to launch on the market in 2025.

Marama Labs, a Victoria University of Wellington spinout company, was founded in 2019 in New Zealand by physicists Dr Brendan Darby (CEO), Dr Matthias Meyer and Professor Eric Le Ru (CSO), when they discovered a fundamentally new way to optically interrogate highly cloudy liquids using light-based sensors; the breakthrough led to the development of its CloudSpec UV-Vis spectrophotometer.

Life sciences and pharmaceutical manufacturing

Initially commercialised for winemaking analysis, Marama Labs has widened the CloudSpec applications into the life-sciences market, where opaque liquids are a major hurdle for drug discovery, process monitoring, quality assurance and new product development.

CloudSpec’s unique ability to measure UV-Vis spectra of highly turbid samples, like lipid-based nano-medicines, has caught the attention of the life-sciences industry. Commercial trials are underway with leading pharmaceutical manufacturers in Europe and the US, for optimising vaccine development workflows. Compared to expensive and time-consuming analytical techniques like HPLC and fluorescent-based assays, which can take hours to get a result, CloudSpec can obtain the same information in a few seconds.

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