DNA sequencing made simple — complete pathogen answers in one kit, one shift, at $50/test.
Confirmed by founderApogene is removing the bottleneck in DNA sequencing and unlocking the code behind the disease. And, were making it available for routine testing by reducing: • the hands-on time by 90%, so that almost anyone can run it; • the cost by 85%, so that health insurance will cover it; and • the time to result from a week to a workshift, so that patients get the results they need when they need it. Focused initially on drug-resistant infection diagnostics, Apogene is addressing a $5B serviceable market and plans to expand into oncology and genetic disease testing. The company is commercializing a kit-first strategy: entering with a low-cost sample-prep kit requiring no new customer instrumentation, then scaling to a full sample-to-sequence kit, and ultimately an integrated benchtop instrument. To be clear: we're not building a better DNA sequencer. We're building the technology that will make DNA sequencing practical for every clinic in the world.
See something off about this company?
Chris Cooney
founder
Christopher Cooney
founder
Today, DNA sequencing is clinically valuable but operationally inaccessible for most labs. The bottleneck is not the sequencer itself, but the up-front workflow: sample prep, library prep, and cleanup. These steps are manual, slow, and difficult to scale for diagnostic testing throughputs. As a result, sequencing remains concentrated in specialized, low-scale centers instead of reaching the much broader clinical markets that need it.
Apogene is using proprietary chemistry to reduce the complexity of the preparation steps for DNA sequencing by 50X, which reduces the hands on time by 90%, the cost by 85%, and the processing time by 75%.
Apogene secured its first sale to the FDA for foodborne pathogen testing and raised 20k in addition to a $3.6M NIH-backed development program initiated in 2023, which supported the development of a working prototype for drug-resistant TB in 2024. Additionally, Apogene licensed the technology with pending and granted patents as of 2026, and is in initiating pilot studies with a Southeast Asian distributor along with a strategic corporate partnership with Illumina.
