The mission of the Women Leaders of Octane (WLO) Funding Committee is to increase access to capital for women entrepreneurs in Southern California by providing education and access to available funding options. WLO is an initiative of Octane that also includes programs targeted to increase the number of women entrepreneurs and women on boards in the region.

Please meet our committee:

• Chair: Delilah Panio, Toronto Stock Exchange
• Melissa Bui, Bank of America
• Deb Hart, Maravai Life Sciences
• Xandra Laskowski, OSEA Angel Investors
• Tracie Rotter, DataLabs

Woman-Led LaunchPad Success Story

In each article, we are happy to profile a woman-led company that has gone through OCTANE’s LaunchPad program and has successfully raised capital.

Chorom Pak, Founder & CEO, Lynx Biosciences

Lynx Biosciences, Inc. (LynxBio®) is a San Diego-based biotech generating unparalleled biological insights by combining integrative multi-omic readouts and high-content imaging with microfluidic disease models. Leveraging this platform, LynxBio matches disease and therapeutic complexity during oncology drug discovery and development. We forge partnerships with pharma to leverage our unique data engine to drive therapeutic discovery and development, provide insights into disease progression, and identify biomarkers of response. The company is currently incubating at Johnson & Johnson JLABS San Diego and recently executed a multi-phase R&D agreement with a Top-3 biopharma. At least three agreements with additional biopharma are slated for execution in 2021.

Funding Profile

Lynx has been funded by $4.3 M in grants and $2.4 M in seed funding, which was led by the Cove Fund. They are currently raising a $10M Series A to scale and meet latent demand, automate our platform, and grow and leverage their integrated data engine.

About the Founder 

Chorom Pak is a cancer biologist by training and received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Prior to spinning LynxBio, she led research and clinical development at a small, publicly traded biotech developing cancer therapeutics for hematological malignancies. She founded LynxBio in late 2017 to commercialize the microfluidic technology developed while working on her PhD for oncology drug discovery, development, and patient treatment. Interesting fact about Chorom: She sees letters and musical notes in different colors.

Women of Octane Funding Series

The funding committee is proud to announce that we will be launching a funding series in the Fall. Stay tuned for the details and dates to be announced in the coming weeks.