Taudia closed a $4 million seed round in January 2026, according to NTU Ventures, which put in $500,000. The San Carlos company has not publicly disclosed the lead investor or other backers, a common move for early-stage biotech firms that prefer to stay quiet until regulatory milestones arrive.
What sets Taudia apart in a suddenly crowded field isn't just its technology. The startup, founded in 2024, has designed blood tests for Alzheimer's biomarkers that run on standard qPCR machines, the kind of lab equipment already humming in thousands of clinical facilities. No proprietary analyzer required. That matters in a diagnostic market where infrastructure cost often determines who gets tested and where.
The company's SPLASH platform claims ultrasensitivity reaching femtogram-per-milliliter concentrations for proteins like phosphorylated tau-217 and amyloid beta, according to Taudia. Compare that to competitors like Quanterix and Alamar Biosciences, which have built their workflows around specialized instruments that labs must purchase separately. Fujirebio, meanwhile, won FDA 510(k) clearance in May 2025 for the first blood-based Alzheimer's in vitro diagnostic—a pTau217/β-Amyloid plasma ratio test that runs on its CLEIA analyzer.
Taudia's pitch is accessibility at scale. At the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in London last July, the company offered early access to two kits: eMTBR-Tau243 and a brain-derived pTau-217 assay. A CLIA-validated five-plex panel is slated for launch at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer's Disease conference later this year. That panel will measure pTau-217, Aβ42, Aβ40, neurofilament light, and glial fibrillary acidic protein in one go.
A medRxiv preprint posted in February by Taudia employees and collaborators described SPLASH achieving sub-picogram sensitivity on benchtop qPCR. The automated NeuXplore workflow processes up to 48 samples in under four hours, the company's website states (archived in August). The technology uses proximity ligation and single-wash bead capture to cut background signal, then reads DNA tags via qPCR or digital PCR for quantitation.
CEO Paul Hung brings a track record of exits. He co-founded CellASIC, which Merck KGaA's EMD Millipore division acquired in April 2012, and Combinati, later picked up by Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2021. His co-founders include Cindy Chen from Millipore Sigma; Robert Lin, who held product roles at Cepheid and Thermo Fisher; Hien Nguyen, who invented the core assay chemistry; and Jason Wan, also from Thermo Fisher. LinkedIn pegs the company at two to 10 employees, though that figure may lag given the funding round and recent partnerships.
In July, Taudia joined the Global Alzheimer's Platform Foundation's Bio-Hermes-002 observational study, contributing blood and cerebrospinal fluid assays for BD pTau-217 and eMTBR-Tau243. The consortium includes Biogen, Eli Lilly, Roche, Siemens Healthineers, Quanterix, and Alamar Biosciences. "Taudia's decision to join the growing list of collaborators in the Bio-Hermes-002 study adds yet another emerging leader in AD diagnostic tests," GAP president John Dwyer said in the announcement. Hung, for his part, said the company was "honored to partner with the Global Alzheimer's Platform Foundation and contribute to the Bio-Hermes-002 study."
The timing isn't accidental. The FDA approved Eli Lilly's Kisunla (donanemab-azbt) on July 2, 2024, and granted traditional approval to Biogen and Eisai's Leqembi in July 2023. Both are anti-amyloid therapies with strict eligibility criteria, and CMS broadened Medicare coverage for Leqembi following traditional approval. Blood-based biomarker tests are now essential for patient selection and monitoring, creating demand for diagnostics that can scale beyond academic medical centers.
Taudia is competing on infrastructure cost, a wedge that could matter more than sensitivity alone. "Imagine detecting neurodegenerative disease biomarkers from a simple blood draw—with fg/mL sensitivity…on any qPCR instrument," Hung wrote on LinkedIn late last year. The company's scientific advisory board includes Edward Wilson, director of biofluid biomarker testing at the Stanford Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, and Jennifer Yokoyama of UCSF, editor-in-chief of npj Dementia. Both spoke at Taudia's AAIC product theater in July.
Comparative data from the Bio-Hermes-002 study and the CLIA-validated five-plex launch are both expected at CTAD later this year. If the data hold up, Taudia may have found a niche that others overlooked: not the most sensitive test, perhaps, but the one that fits into existing workflows without asking labs to rip out and replace their equipment.
