Haga Bioscience (HAGA.BIO), a Swedish spatial biology startup, today announced it has closed a SEK 20.9 million (approximately USD 2.3 million) oversubscribed Seed financing round, bringing total funding, including pre-seed financing, to approximately USD 3 million. The company will use the capital to initiate the commercialisation of its spatial biology technologies designed specifically for validation and translational workflows.
The financing included participation from Almi Invest, Life Science Invest and SU Ventures, alongside undisclosed life science industry veterans, family offices and private investors.
Founded in 2024, Stockholm-based HAGA.BIO is focused on advancing the next phase of spatial biology by bridging the gap between spatial RNA biomarker discovery and clinical translation. While recent advances in spatial biology have enabled the discovery of large numbers of novel tissue based RNA biomarkers, validating these findings across large clinical cohorts remains a major challenge due to sample throughput and the high costs. HAGA.BIO said its technologies are specifically designed to enable cost effective scalable validation and translational workflows.
The technologies enable sensitive, specific detection of single nucleotide variants (SNVs) on RNA directly in situ, and are built on next-generation in situ hybridisation methods developed by co-founders Hower Lee (CEO), Marco Grillo (CSO) and Mats Nilsson, professor at Stockholm University and scientific co-founder of the company.
Additional co-founders include Malte Kuhnemund, Daniel Gyllborg, and Xiaoyan Qian, previously at 10x Genomics. Kuhnemund and Qian co-founded Cartana in 2017, a SciLifeLab spinout whose in situ RNA sequencing technology was acquired by 10x Genomics in 2020 and integrated into the Xenium platform.
“Until now, the field has lacked robust in situ variant calling on FFPE tissue samples with high sensitivity and specificity,” said Hower Lee, co-founder and CEO of Haga Bioscience. “Addressing this challenge enables new possibilities for translational research.”
“Discovery is no longer the bottleneck,” said Mats Nilsson, professor at Stockholm University and scientific co-founder of Haga Bioscience. “The next major step for the field is translating and validating these discoveries at scale and ultimately into clinical use. That is precisely what HAGA.BIO aims to enable.”
The financing supports product development, commercialisation and collaborations with academic and industry partners to advance translational spatial biology. The company officially announced the early access programme at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute In Situ Hybridisation and Spatial Omics Symposium on May 20, 2026.
Through the programme, HAGA.BIO is providing early access to HAGA Pattern™, a multiplexed spatial gene expression assay, and HAGA Point™, a spatial assay for in situ SNV detection on RNA.
HAGA.BIO will also participate in the 2026 European Association for Cancer Research (EACR) Congress in Budapest from June 8 to 11, 2026, where the company plans to present its latest advances in translational spatial RNA analysis.
