Biotix Raises $2M to Help Fund Growth

Biotix, a San Diego company that supplies pipette tips, reagent reservoirs, and other laboratory consumables, has raised $2 million of a planned $4 million Series B equity round, according to a recent regulatory filing.

Biotix plans to use the proceeds “to help with the growth that we’ve experienced and expand our current operations,” spokeswoman Mickie Henshall says.

Biotix was founded in 2005 to develop high-end and heavily engineered pipette tips solely for robotic equipment used in life sciences and research laboratories. Henshall says the Pelican Group, a San Diego life sciences holding company, acquired Biotix and combined its operations in 2008 with Continental Lab Products, a longstanding San Diego provider of laboratory supplies that Pelican had absorbed in 2006. Pelican also restructured its operations and shed other assets so that today “Pelican actually is Biotix,” Henshall says.

Investors were not disclosed in the latest filing, but Henshall says Grotech Ventures of Vienna, VA, and Ferrar, Freeman & Co. of Greenwich, CT, are the company’s only investors. Henshall says Biotix has so far raised a total of $74 million in venture capital.

The company says its origins reflected a realization that laboratory consumables were not keeping pace with increasingly stringent performance requirements for supporting advances in molecular methods and technologies. As a result, Biotix says it has developed more than 100 new products (supported by 30 patent applications) to serve life sciences, clinical, pharmaceutical, and biotech laboratories.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.