Pumpkinseed
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Investors
About
Pumpkinseed is a Palo Alto-based biotech company spun out of Stanford University in 2021, co-founded by Jennifer Dionne (Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford and CZ Biohub investigator), Jack Hu, and Nhat Vu (formerly of Google and Nest) 12. The company has developed a proprietary nanophotonic chip platform called deSIPHR that uses Raman spectroscopy and silicon photonics to perform de novo protein sequencing at single-molecule resolution, with the aim of unlocking proteomic data at scale for biopharma and AI-driven biology applications 12.
Funding History
| Date | Round | Amount | Lead | Co-investors |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Seed | $12M | NFX, Base4 | Future Ventures 3 |
| 2026-05-05 | Series A | $20M | NFX, Future Ventures | Base4, ADVentures, Stanford 1 |
What Investors Say
Omri Amirav-Drory, NFX, on the Series A: “Pumpkinseed can close the measurement gap between what a real-world biological sample contains and the digital input needed for AI models.” 1
Steve Jurvetson and Maryanna Saenko, Future Ventures, on the Series A: “When the proteome becomes fully legible at scale, the consequences ripple across medicine, biology, and AI.” 1
What Founders Say
Jennifer Dionne, co-founder of Pumpkinseed and Stanford professor: “Biology’s biggest bottleneck isn’t wet lab capability or compute — it’s actionable information density per cell per dollar.” 1
Sources
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Pumpkinseed, “Pumpkinseed Raises $20M Series A to Unlock Biology’s Most Valuable Hidden Data Layer,” May 5, 2026, accessed April 2026. https://www.pumpkinseed.bio/news/pumpkinseed-raises-20m-series-a-to-unlock-biologys-most-valuable-hidden-data-layer↩↩↩↩↩↩
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SynBioBeta, “Pumpkinseed Shines New Light on the Proteome,” accessed April 2026. https://www.synbiobeta.com/read/pumpkinseed-shines-new-light-on-the-proteome↩↩
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GenomeWeb, “Stanford U Spinout Pumpkinseed Pursues Chip-Based Peptide Sequencing, Immune Cell Analysis,” accessed April 2026. https://www.genomeweb.com/proteomics-protein-research/stanford-u-spinout-pumpkinseed-pursues-chip-based-peptide-sequencing↩