US-based Ancera has raised $8.9m in Series A funding to develop technology that assists food producers to identity contaminants quickly.
The funding round is led by existing investor Glass Capital, with participation from Packers Sanitation Services (PSSI), a provider of cleaning and sanitation services for the food industry and Metabiota, an epidemic risk analytics company.
The latest round of funding takes the total amount raised so far by Ancera to $12.3m.
The common contaminants faced by the food industry include salmonella, e. coli, and Listeria, which lead to illness after consumption.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in six people are prone to food poisoning annually.
Ancera plans to launch its first hardware product Piper next month. The product uses disposable cartridges about the size of a smartphone, TechCrunch reported.
Ancera co-founder and CEO Arjun Ganesan was quoted the publication as saying: "Every other platform on the market destroys cells in the testing process.
"We gather cells and do not destroy them, which means you can take them immediately into sequencing, and figure out the root cause of your problem, which is to say exactly where the salmonella originated in your supply chain."
Glass Capital Management's Carl Zwerner said that investors expect the company to use the funds mainly to ramp up hiring and to commercialize its production and distribution of testing instruments and cartridges.
Zwerner said: "We wanted to fund this whole thing so that Arjun could just focus on scaling up.
"You can easily see society's need for something like this if you have ever had food poisoning yourself."
