Guardant Health, a fast-growing and well-funded life-sciences company that can diagnose and track cancer with a blood test rather than a biopsy, has raised a $50 million Series C round to move operations into a larger laboratory to meet demand.
The funding was provided by Lightspeed Venture Partners, joined by Formation 8 and returning investors Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital.
Guardant operates a laboratory that for the past seven months has been analyzing blood samples from patients with various kinds of cancer. The company uses high-powered genome-sequencing technology to monitor cells shed by cancerous tumors as they appear in the blood.
Demand has ramped up so fast that the company, which had eight employees a year ago and today employs 75, will soon need to move to a new, 50,000-square-foot lab to handle the work.
