Semarion raises £2.9M led by Parkwalk to scale cell assay platform
March 31, 2026
Semarion, a University of Cambridge spin-out from the Cavendish Laboratory, has raised £2.9 million ($3.8 million) in equity funding led by Parkwalk to expand commercial rollout of its SemaCyte cell assay platform.
Adherent cells underpin most in vitro drug screening work, but they are slow to handle, hard to automate, and expensive to scale. As pharma research budgets tighten and screening campaigns grow, labs are under pressure to generate more cell-based data with the same headcount and infrastructure — a bottleneck that conventional plate-based workflows were not designed to solve.
Semarion's SemaCyte platform converts adherent cells into ultra-miniaturised, optically barcoded microcarriers that behave like liquid reagents. Researchers can multiplex multiple cell models in a single well, freeze SemaCytes for assay-ready dispensing, and run them through standard liquid handling and imaging tools without rebuilding their workflows. The company says the approach can deliver up to ten-fold gains in data generation alongside lower per-assay costs. Semarion was co-founded in 2018 by Jeroen Verheyen (CEO), Tarun Vemulkar (CTO), and Professor Russell Cowburn FRS, combining cell biology with the materials physics and microfabrication techniques developed in Cowburn's Cavendish Laboratory group.
The platform is in active use at top-10 global pharmaceutical companies in the US and Europe, with several pilot programmes moving towards broader commercial deployment. Semarion has also signed integration partnerships with life science tools firms Revvity — which has built SemaCyte detection into its Harmony imaging and Signals Image Artist platforms — and SPT Labtech, whose liquid handling systems can now run automated SemaCyte assays. The new funding follows a £2.14M seed in 2022 and a £2M pre-Series A round earlier in 2025, both also led by Parkwalk.
Alongside Parkwalk, the round was joined by The FSE Group, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, Oxford Innovation Finance, Found Capital, Cambridge Capital Group, and Start Codon. The capital will fund manufacturing capacity, expansion of Semarion's field application and commercial teams, and deeper partnerships with pharma and tools providers, positioning the company for a Series A targeted for late 2026.
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