Seed Funding Drives Development of Benchtop Exosome System for Precision Medicine
Hands-off isolation technology delivers higher yield and quality of extracellular vesicles, enabling reproducible workflows for clinical research and diagnostics
SAN FRANCISCO — NOVEMBER 18, 2025 — Hermes Biosciences, a San Francisco-based company developing extracellular vesicle (EV) technologies, today announced it has closed its seed financing as it develops a benchtop, hands-off extracellular vesicle isolation system for faster and more accurate analysis of exosomes. The system is expected to be commercially available in 2026, aimed at clinical researchers across academia, Pharma, and clinical customers who require standardized, scalable workflows. The round was led by Genoa Ventures with participation from other top-class VC firms, and early-stage capital and incubation support from General Inception.
“Exosomes carry information that could fundamentally change how we detect and understand disease, but that value depends on being able to study them reliably,” said Paco Cifuentes, PhD, CEO of Hermes Biosciences. “Our technology opens the door for the clinical and research community to use EVs as the analyte of choice, filling the sensitivity gap that ctDNA and proteins have today, especially for early diagnostics. Simply put, providing easy and scalable access to EVs with our platform will save lives through better therapeutic insights and earlier disease detection.”
EVs are nanometer-sized particles shed into body fluids, including blood and urine, that carry molecular information relevant to understanding, diagnosing, and treating cancer, degenerative diseases, and conditions in regenerative medicine. Their abundance, ubiquity, and specificity of their cargo signal make them ideal analytes to achieve the sensitivity needed for early disease studies. This has propelled the interest among researchers and companies who are exploiting their potential as early-stage disease biomarkers and therapeutic agents. However, extracting exosomes is typically slow, inconsistent, and labor-intensive. The lack of reliable tools to isolate high-quality exosomes is a major pain point. Ultracentrifugation, the most widely used method, is cumbersome, unscalable, and unreliable, and column-based kits add steps that are difficult to integrate with clinical workflows.
Based on the nanofiltration technology invented by Hermes co-founder professor Utkan Demirci at the Stanford University School of Medicine, the platform isolates EVs with exceptionally high yield and purity through a simple, automated workflow. This technology delivers nearly 100 times more vesicles than ultracentrifugation and 10 times more than other commercially available systems, while maintaining the integrity of the vesicles and their molecular cargo. The hands-off system and automated workflow are intended to support high-throughput use and downstream applications as EVs continue being adopted as clinical assets.
“We first met Hermes Bio years ago, and recognized they were on the cusp of tapping into the molecular conversations cells use that define the line between health and disease,” said Vikram Chaudhery, PhD, partner at Genoa Ventures and president of General Inception. “The combination of this accomplished team, innovative science and technological advancement represents an ideal portfolio company for Genoa, and a journey we are excited to support in all the future steps.”