Alumnus startup Nicoya secures $20M in new funding

A medical startup company headed by a Waterloo Engineering alumnus has secured $20 million in new funding to fuel expansion and the development and commercialization of its flagship product.

Nicoya Lifesciences, co-founded in 2012 by Ryan Denomme (BASc’10, nanontechnology engineering, MASc ’12, mechanical engineering), is based in Kitchener and has over 100 employees.

Ryan Denomme is a co-founder and CEO of Kitchener-based Nicoya Lifesciences.

The funding round – which brings total investment in the company to $35 million – was led by Whitecap Venture Partners and announced this week.

“The team at Nicoya is building disruptive tools for disease and drug discovery research,” Russell Samuels, a partner at Whitecap, said in a media release. “Their technology is being used every day by scientists who develop life-saving drugs and make key findings about common diseases that affect our lives.”

Nicoya is dedicated to helping scientists better understand and treat diseases by providing them with tools to speed discoveries, saving time and money. Its flagship product is a biosensor platform called Alto.

“We are entering into the next era of proteomics, the growth of which parallels that of the genomics industry,” Denomme, CEO of the company, said in the release. “This additional funding enables us to continue building innovative tools that will support the needs of this rapidly evolving industry.”