Hong Kong-headquartered PHASE Scientific, a biotech firm engaged in early disease detection through proprietary urine-based diagnostics, has snapped $34 million in a Series A funding round led by Hong Kong-listed asset management firm Value Partners Group.
“With this capital, we will accelerate R&D and commercialisation efforts to bring a comprehensive suite of next-generation urine-based diagnostics to market,” said Ricky Chiu, founder, chairman, and CEO of PHASE Scientific.
With a mission to empower early intervention through user-friendly testing, PHASE Scientific, which builds on its patented PHASIFYTM urine concentration technology, claims to be the only firm advancing a pipeline of urine-based liquid biopsy diagnostics.
In April 2019, the firm raised $13 million from US government agencies; the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation; and Joseph Wing-On Tam, the founder and chairman of the board of DagCor Bioscience, a top brand of molecular diagnosis in the city.
Besides its headquarters in Hong Kong, the firm has offices in Los Angeles and Atlanta in the US, and Shenzhen in China. Founded in 2015, the firm is developing a suite of non-invasive tests for early detection of cancers, women’s health conditions, and infectious diseases that allows users to take the tests conveniently, compared to the traditional invasive screening methods.
So far, the 10-year-old firm has launched over 30 diagnostic products across multiple health categories, with over 100 million tests to be distributed to over 30 countries.
The capital injection in PHASE Scientific comes two months after Value Partners led clinical-stage AI-driven drug discovery firm Insilico Medicine’s $110-million Series E round.
With $5.1 billion of assets under management (AUM) as of end of December 2024, Value Partners invests across equities, fixed income, alternatives, multi-asset and quantitative investment solutions, serving institutional and individual clients in Asia Pacific, Europe, and North America.
By strategy, absolute return long-biased funds represent the largest share of Value Partners’s AUM, followed by fixed income funds (23%), while alternative funds account for 9% of the share, per its 2024 annual report.
The Hong Kong-listed firm also disclosed in the report that it launched a healthcare thematic private equity fund in 2024, without disclosing the fund size.
