Day Zero Diagnostics Announces Completion of $21M Financing

Day Zero Diagnostics, Inc., an infectious disease diagnostics company harnessing the power of whole-genome sequencing and machine learning to combat the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections, announced the completion of a $21M venture equity financing. The round was led by Sands Capital, with significant participation from new investors, including BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), Panacea Venture and Hongkou Capital, alongside existing investors including Triventures and Golden Seeds. To date, Day Zero Diagnostics has raised over $33M in venture capital financing and over $10M in non-dilutive funding.

Day Zero Diagnostics is developing sequencing-based diagnostic technologies that can identify, within hours, both the species and the antibiotic resistance profile of a bacterial pathogen. In cases of severe infection like sepsis, current approaches to antibiotic resistance testing take days to provide similar information, a time delay that is associated with an 8% increase in death per hour.¹ Antibiotic resistance, the other pandemic in infectious diseases, was directly responsible for 1.3 million deaths in 2019, killing more people than HIV/AIDS or malaria.² Day Zero’s revolutionary approach to diagnosing infectious diseases, particularly their antibiotic resistance profile, has the potential to save lives while reducing the economic burden of severe infections.

“The continued support of our investors and participation by new investors, including BD as a leader in the field of infectious disease diagnostics, is a strong vote of confidence in the technologies we have built, as well as our vision for the future of genome sequencing in infectious disease diagnostics,” said Jong Lee, CEO and a co-founder of Day Zero Diagnostics. “This funding allows us to complete the product engineering phase of our diagnostic development process as well as supporting the launch of our CLIA lab services.”

Day Zero Diagnostics has developed and validated proprietary methods to rapidly identify pathogen species and drug resistance profiles using high throughput sequencing. These technologies include processes for Ultra-High Enrichment (UHE) of bacterial DNA from complex clinical samples, such as blood, as well as Keynome®, a family of novel machine learning algorithms for identifying pathogen species and predicting antibiotic resistance from whole genomic sequences. The company’s approach allows for the simultaneous testing of a broad range of bacterial species and determination of antibiotic resistance and susceptibility without the need for traditional culture-based workflows. Using the diagnostic, hospitals should be able to dramatically reduce hospital length of stay, the overuse of expensive and often ineffective antibiotics, and, most importantly, excess mortality.

As part of the financing, Brooke Story, President of Integrated Diagnostic Solutions at BD, will join the Board of Directors as an observer. “We have been following the work done at DZD for a few years,” said Story. “We believe that genome sequencing will play an important role in infectious disease diagnostics in the future and the DZD technologies have the potential to play a leading role in that evolution.”

With this financing, DZD will complete the product engineering phase of its diagnostic development effort. In addition, funds will expand DZD Lab Services offerings and strengthen its position as a leading provider of sequencing based diagnostic services to help clinicians address critical infection situations and transmission events.