From his perch at Mount Sinai medical school, assistant professor Ravi Sachidanandam has been riding the entrepreneurial wave that’s been rolling through the city’s biotech sector.
In late 2013, the physicist-turned-genome researcher rented a work counter at the just-opened Harlem Biospace incubator and launched a startup focused on the immune system and genetics. Named Girihlet, after Islamic geometric “girih” tiles, it now has five employees and is hiring five more. Girihlet also recently scored a $2.5 million investment led by a top Silicon Valley firm and has enough customers for its sequencing technologies—one of which can monitor the immune system through blood samples—to be close to breaking even.
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