Proximity resolution: Swedish Pixelgen raises $15.5M to take cell architecture platform global

Pixelgen Technologies has raised $15.5 million in an oversubscribed Series B financing as the Swedish life sciences technology company moves from platform development toward broader commercial adoption.

The round was led by new investor Flat Capital, with existing backers Industrifonden and Navigare Ventures also participating. Pixelgen says the financing will be used to expand internationally, grow its team and product portfolio, and increase adoption of its Proxiome Kit and associated data-analysis software.

The financing comes as Pixelgen is seeking to establish its technology as a new analytical layer in single-cell biology. Alongside the financing, Flat Capital CEO Rickard El Tarzi and life sciences technology entrepreneur Ramon Felciano joined the company’s board.

“This financing gives us the resources to expand globally as demand grows for our Proxiome Kit and our data analysis and visualization software,” said CEO and co-founder Simon Fredriksson.

Why is this interesting?

Most proteomics platforms are designed to answer a relatively straightforward question: which proteins are present, and in what quantities?

But proteins do not operate in isolation. Their function can depend on where they are located, which other proteins they are close to and how they are organized into molecular complexes. That is particularly important for immune cells, where receptors and other surface proteins form dynamic structures that influence cell activation and response.

Pixelgen’s Proxiome technology is designed to capture this organization. Its Proximity Network Assay uses DNA-based chemistry to map the proximity of proteins on individual cells at nanoscale resolution. The company’s current Proxiome Kit can simultaneously analyze 155 cell-surface proteins, generating information on protein abundance as well as clustering and colocalization. The current version offers approximately 50-nanometer resolution and can process up to 64 samples per experiment using standard sequencing workflows.

That distinction matters because two cells can contain similar amounts of a protein but behave differently if the proteins are arranged differently on the cell surface.

Pixelgen is therefore positioning its technology not simply as another proteomics assay, but as a way of measuring molecular cell architecture.

The potential applications include immunology, oncology, hematology and cell therapy, where changes in cell-surface organization could reveal disease mechanisms, treatment responses or biomarkers that conventional abundance measurements miss.

“Pixelgen’s technology gives researchers the ability to study disease mechanisms and identify novel biomarkers in an entirely new way,” said Rickard El Tarzi, CEO of Flat Capital. “We believe this could open new avenues for research in cancer, immunology and autoimmune disease.”

From spatial proteomics to protein interactomics

The company was founded in Stockholm in 2020 and initially described its technology as spatial proteomics. Its first commercial platform emerged from stealth in 2022, followed by a $7.3 million Series A in 2023 led by Industrifonden and Navigare Ventures. That financing supported the commercial expansion of Pixelgen’s first product for single-cell protein analysis.

Pixelgen subsequently moved toward what it now calls protein interactomics by proximity networks.

The shift is significant. Conventional single-cell proteomics generally creates a profile of proteins expressed by individual cells. Pixelgen wants to add information about the physical relationships between those proteins.

Its Proxiome Kit is also designed to fit into existing laboratory workflows rather than requiring a proprietary instrument. The latest version can be run using standard molecular biology workflows and sequencing platforms, with Pixelator software used to process and analyze the resulting data.

That could make the technology easier to adopt than platform technologies that require laboratories to purchase dedicated hardware.

A European platform in a rapidly consolidating market

Pixelgen is entering a proteomics market that has attracted substantial strategic interest from large life sciences companies.

The most prominent European example is Sweden’s Olink, whose proximity-based proteomics technology was acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2024 for approximately $3.1 billion. Thermo Fisher described the deal as a way to strengthen its position in the growing proteomics market and complement its existing mass-spectrometry and life sciences platforms.

Pixelgen is not directly competing with Olink’s high-throughput circulating-protein profiling model. Its focus is much closer to the single-cell and spatial organization of proteins, particularly on cell surfaces.

But the Olink deal illustrates why the category is attracting attention: technologies that generate new layers of biological information can become strategically valuable once they move from academic research into drug discovery and precision medicine.

Pixelgen has already attracted European institutional backing beyond conventional venture capital. In 2025, the company received €12.5 million in blended grant and equity financing from the European Innovation Council Accelerator to expand its technology into cell-cell interactions and tissue applications.

The Series B therefore represents another step in a progression from technology development toward commercialization.

What comes next?

The immediate priority is geographical and commercial expansion. Pixelgen says the new capital will support its presence in key international markets, expand its team and broaden its product portfolio.

The company is also extending beyond its original immune-profiling application. Its current portfolio includes the Proxiome Kit for 155 immune surface proteins, custom conjugation options, CAR-T products and Pixelator software for data analysis.

That broader product strategy could prove important. A technology that is useful only for a narrow research application can remain a specialized tool; a platform that can be adapted to different cell types, disease areas and therapeutic programs has a much larger commercial opportunity.

Pixelgen’s board appointments reflect that ambition. El Tarzi brings experience from Olink, where he served as chief strategy and product officer before the company was acquired by Thermo Fisher. Felciano, meanwhile, founded Ingenuity Systems, an early AI-driven genome interpretation company acquired by QIAGEN for $105 million in 2013, and subsequently built QIAGEN Digital Insights.

For Pixelgen, the combination is intended to address two different challenges: scaling a life sciences platform internationally and turning the resulting biological data into a software and data advantage.

“Rickard understands what it takes to scale and commercialize life sciences research platforms globally, while Ramon has built AI and data businesses with products that have been adopted by biotech R&D,” Fredriksson said.

That last point may ultimately be as important as the assay itself. The competitive value of a new omics platform increasingly lies not just in generating another dataset, but in making that dataset interpretable, comparable and useful for drug discovery.

Pixelgen’s next phase will therefore test whether molecular cell architecture can move from an intriguing research technology into a broadly adopted platform — and whether its data layer can become as important as the underlying assay.