Pumpkinseed

About Pumpkinseed

Pumpkinseed is a biotechnology firm founded in 2021 by Professor Jen Dionne, Dr. Jack Hu, and Dr. Nhat Vu as a Stanford University spinout. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The founding team combines expertise from academia and industry; Dionne is a professor at Stanford and the CZ Biohub, Hu was recognized on Forbes 30 Under 30 for developing the core technology during his Ph.D. at Stanford, and Vu formerly worked with Google and Nest. The company is developing a platform to sequence proteins at high-throughput speeds. Its core technology, the deSIPHR platform, utilizes proprietary nanophotonic chips to read protein identity, sequence, and modifications at a single-molecule level. This physics-based method uses Raman spectroscopy to detect the unique vibrational signature of each protein molecule as light scatters off it, which the company likens to a molecular "fingerprint." This approach avoids the need for biochemical probes, fluorescent labels, or sample fragmentation, which are common in traditional protein analysis methods. The silicon photonic chips can be patterned with millions of sensors per square centimeter, enabling the analysis of a vast number of proteins simultaneously. Pumpkinseed targets its services toward partners in biopharma, biological AI, and biosecurity. In drug discovery, the platform can accelerate target identification and therapeutic design by providing direct reads of the proteins that drugs act on. For AI applications, it generates the high-resolution proteomic datasets required for building advanced virtual cell models. In biosecurity, the technology's ability to sequence proteins de novo allows for the detection of novel biomarkers and unknown biological threats that are not in existing databases. On May 5, 2026, the company announced it had raised a $20 million Series A round from investors including NFX and Future Ventures to scale its platform. Keywords: protein sequencing, proteomics, nanophotonics, silicon photonics, de novo sequencing, single-molecule resolution, biopharma, biosecurity, AI biology, drug discovery, nanophotonic chips, Raman spectroscopy, molecular diagnostics, peptide sequencing, immunopeptidomics, biologics development, biomarker discovery, post-translational modifications, Stanford spinout, Jen Dionne, Jack Hu, Nhat Vu