Pumpkinseed has closed a $20 million Series A co-led by NfX and Future Ventures to scale its deSIPHR nanophotonic chip platform from peptide to full-length protein sequencing — advancing active programs in biopharma and biosecurity and building the proteomic datasets that medicine and science have been waiting for.

In an exclusive interview ahead of SynBioBeta 2026, co-founder and Stanford Professor Jennifer Dionne outlines how Pumpkinseed's nanophotonic chip platform is opening the proteome to investigation at a resolution and scale the field has never had before — and why that changes everything for drug discovery, AI biology, and medicine.

A Stanford University spinout is on its way toward commercializing silicon chip-based technology that can sequence peptides as well as provide functional information about proteins expressed in cells.

A new method using tightly focused beams of light may soon far surpass traditional protein sequencing, while linking antigen sequences directly to immune cell activity — opening the door to entirely new immune-modulating medicines.

Stanford researchers are using nanophotonic chips to rapidly identify proteins at scale — a physics-based approach that sidesteps the complexity of traditional methods and opens new possibilities for protein-based therapeutics, synthetic biology, and beyond.