DropGenie Closes Seed+ Funding Round Led by Skeleton Key

The round also saw new investors Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and CQDM, and existing investors Real Ventures and Anges Québec.

The company plans to use the funds to increase manufacturing capacity, develop its commercial operations, and speed up customer adoption.

The rollout comes after successful testing through DropGenie’s Early Access Program, where several major global pharma, biotech, and research organizations have already started using the technology in their workflows.

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DropGenie’s platform supports high-throughput, miniaturized gene editing that uses fewer cells and reagents per experiment. This helps reduce costs and speeds up editing results. It also allows direct editing of primary patient cells, giving more relevant biological insights earlier in the research and development process.

"The most powerful insights in biology come from perturbations—changing one thing and watching how a living system responds. But capturing those signals with fidelity demands working at the right scale, in the right cells," said Alison Hirukawa, CEO & Co-founder of DropGenie. "Our platform miniaturizes workflows and lowers cell requirements to enable direct editing of primary patient cells—giving researchers access to true biological readouts previously impossible to capture. This opens the door to faster, more predictive development across cell therapy, functional genomics, and beyond."

"We find the DropGenie platform's ability to reliably miniaturize and accelerate experimental workflows via automation to be extremely compelling," said Ann Lai, Managing Partner of Skeleton Key. "Being able to capture every parameter variation of these complex gene editing experimental processes creates the data we need to accelerate innovation fundamentally and to leverage AI beyond the theoretical discovery phases better. This is exactly the kind of science technology Skeleton Key wants to support and see succeed."

About DropGenie

Founded in 2018 by Alison Hirukawa and Hugo Sinha, DropGenie develops next-generation gene editing technologies using small-scale, high-efficiency workflows. With offices in Montreal and Boston, the company enables direct editing of primary patient cells by using far fewer cells per experiment, helping produce more accurate biological results and speeding up research in cell therapy, functional genomics, and AI-driven drug discovery.

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