DeepScan Raises $3.5M to Push Canine cfDNA Testing Into the Vet Mainstream

DeepScan Diagnostics, the Helsinki-based canine cell-free DNA (cfDNA) company, raised $3.5 million to scale its CFD biomarker test beyond its current 100-clinic footprint.

The round, led by existing investor Calm/Storm Ventures with a consortium of European family offices and Business Finland, is a bet that cfDNA, a mainstream biomarker in human oncology, is about to find its commercial form in veterinary medicine.

What Happened

DeepScan Diagnostics announced on April 22 that it raised $3.5 million in new funding. The round was led by Vienna-based healthtech VC Calm/Storm Ventures, an existing investor that increased its commitment.

Additional capital came from Finnish family office Harjavalta Ventures Oy, additional European family offices, angel investors, and Business Finland.

The company's flagship product is the CFD biomarker, a blood test that measures circulating cfDNA levels in dogs. cfDNA, short fragments of DNA released into the bloodstream when cells break down, is a well-established biomarker class in human medicine, widely used in non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT), oncology monitoring, and transplant medicine.

DeepScan is among the first companies to operationalize cfDNA as a generalized cellular-damage biomarker in veterinary care, positioning it as a marker of systemic disease severity and treatment response rather than a disease-specific diagnostic.

CFD launched commercially in 2025 and is currently in use at approximately 100 veterinary clinics and animal hospitals across the United States, United Kingdom, and Finland.

DeepScan's U.S. market entry was anchored by its partnership with Sploot Vets, a Denver-headquartered modern primary-care veterinary chain.

The technical foundation is a proprietary dataset of approximately 6,000 breed-specific cfDNA samples from 4,000 individual dogs, which DeepScan uses to calibrate baseline ranges, a necessary step because cfDNA baselines vary meaningfully by breed.

The company named the use of funds as three buckets: expanding clinical studies across oncology, chronic disease, and acute care; broadening the marker's indicated use cases into emergency and chronic-disease monitoring; and onboarding the hundreds of clinics on DeepScan's international waitlist starting in late 2026.

The release included a quote from Dr. Zachary Wright, the founding chair of the Mars Veterinary Health Oncology Advisory Board and Medical Director at VCA Dallas Animal Specialty Hospital, describing CFD as having potential to "fundamentally improve how cancer treatments are planned."

Why It Matters

The veterinary diagnostics market is dominated structurally by two public giants, IDEXX Laboratories and Antech (a Mars Veterinary Health brand), with a long tail of point-of-care specialists, reference labs, and emerging startups. Inside that market, the oncology-monitoring and treatment-response-assessment subcategory has historically been an expensive gap.

Standard-of-care cancer protocols for dogs run 20 to 40 weeks, and owners and clinicians typically have to wait through most of that window to know if chemotherapy or radiation is working. That uncertainty is both a clinical problem and a business problem: it drives treatment dropout, complicates pricing and financing conversations, and limits protocol optimization.

cfDNA is the biomarker class that plausibly changes that. DeepScan's approach — a non-disease-specific marker that indexes overall cellular damage and responds within one-to-two weeks of treatment adjustments — is closer to a clinical "check engine light" than to a traditional diagnostic.

That framing matters commercially because it shifts the category from a one-time diagnostic sale to a recurring treatment-monitoring workflow, which is structurally a better business for a diagnostics vendor and a better product for a clinic.

Three things make DeepScan's funding announcement more interesting than the raise size alone suggests.

1. Calm/Storm doubling down is a credibility signal. Calm/Storm Ventures is Europe's most active specialist healthtech VC by Sifted's measurement, with 75+ portfolio companies concentrated in diagnostics, digital health, and chronic-condition care.

That kind of investor is unlikely to repeat into a veterinary-focused portfolio company unless the underlying biomarker thesis translates cleanly across human and animal applications, which cfDNA does. The doubled commitment reads as a second-look underwrite of DeepScan's commercial traction and data quality, not a greenfield bet.

2. The breed-specific dataset is the actual moat. cfDNA assays, in isolation, are a commodity-adjacent technology.

The harder problem, and the one that gates clinical utility, is calibration. Baseline cfDNA levels vary meaningfully across breed, age, body condition, and activity level; distinguishing a signal from normal biological variance requires breed-specific reference data. DeepScan's 6,000-sample breed-specific dataset is a defensible asset specifically because it sits upstream of the assay and improves with every additional clinic that runs the test.

Competitors have the technical capability to run a cfDNA assay. Few have the dataset to interpret the results across the breed distribution of a typical general-practice caseload.

3. Sploot Vets anchor and clinic-level distribution are the commercial tell. Landing at a modern primary-care chain like Sploot, rather than only at oncology referral specialists, suggests DeepScan is designing for general-practice adoption, not just specialty-referral use. That's the distribution path that produces volume in veterinary diagnostics.

The 100-clinic installed base is small in absolute terms but mixed across three markets and tilted toward forward-looking practices, which is the right cohort to convert into a reference installed base.

The broader context: the animal-health commercial stack is getting built out in 2026.

The same week DeepScan disclosed this raise, BiomEdit locked in foundational IP for its engineered probiotic platform, Native Microbials installed a Boehringer-trained commercial CEO, and The Bird Bath launched a veterinary market-intelligence platform.

The common denominator across those announcements is the same: a category that spent 2022–2024 on underlying technology is now building commercial infrastructure.

What to Watch

Four things will tell operators whether DeepScan is on a short commercial ramp or a long one.

First, the 2026 clinic-onboarding cadence. DeepScan said it will begin onboarding its international waitlist in late 2026. A waitlist-to-installed-base conversion rate in the 30–50% range over twelve months would put the company on a credible path to 300–500 clinics by late 2027, enough scale to attract strategic-partnership attention from the reference-lab giants. A slower ramp would suggest clinic-side workflow friction that isn't yet solved.

Second, expanded indications. DeepScan's current positioning leans heavily on oncology, which is the indication with the clearest economic ROI for clinics: cancer patients have long, expensive treatment arcs, and treatment-response monitoring has a clean willingness-to-pay. Extension into emergency-care triage and chronic-disease monitoring are structurally bigger markets but harder to build reimbursement or clinic-workflow cases for. Any clinical-study disclosure on ICU or chronic-kidney-disease utility would signal whether the category-expansion strategy is landing.

Third, strategic-buyer signaling. cfDNA diagnostics in the veterinary market will attract attention from IDEXX, Antech, Zoetis's diagnostics line, and Covetrus's reference-lab network. A partnership, licensing, or distribution agreement with any of those players is the classic early-stage consolidation pattern. Reverse signal: a competitor launching a cfDNA assay using a third-party dataset would indicate that DeepScan's dataset moat is narrower than the company's positioning suggests.

Fourth, the valuation read. The $3.5M raise is a bridge-scale round; the next round will be the one that puts a market valuation on the cfDNA-in-vet-medicine thesis. If that round is institutional-led and sized at $15M+ inside the next 18 months, the category is real. If it isn't, the category will remain an interesting specialty play rather than a platform.

Source: DeepScan Diagnostics company-submitted press release

This news brief is based on a company-submitted announcement. The Underbite verifies claims where possible but cannot independently confirm all details.