Tokyo, Japan
ThinkCyte today announced it has been selected for the Unicorn Promotion Program (UPP), a major initiative of Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) R&D agency, aimed at supporting deep tech startups with global potential. The grant provides up to 3 billion yen (~$20 million USD) to help companies scale breakthrough technologies that address major societal and industrial challenges.
Building on previous support from NEDO, the UPP award will enable ThinkCyte to accelerate the transition from technology development to global business expansion. While earlier NEDO programs focused more narrowly on production readiness, the UPP supports a broader scope of growth, including business development and international market deployment for companies on a trajectory toward unicorn-level impact.
ThinkCyte will use the funding to scale the manufacturing and commercialization of its flagship product, VisionSort™. Designed for high-throughput, high-content, and AI-driven cellular analysis and sorting, VisionSort is built on the company’s Science-published Ghost Cytometry technology. Since the launch of VisionSort in 2023, it has been rapidly adopted by major biopharmaceutical companies and academic research centers to address challenges in drug discovery/therapy development, functional cell profiling, and early disease diagnostics. The company also recently announced the pre-commercial launch of its MorphoScan Cloud software platform, designed for VisionSort customers to facilitate global data sharing and analysis.
“We’re proud to have our vision and technology recognized by NEDO,” said Waichiro Katsuda, CEO of ThinkCyte. “This grant will help us bring VisionSort to more labs around the world and accelerate our expansion into key global markets across the U.S., Europe, and Asia.”
About ThinkCyte
ThinkCyte, founded in 2016 with offices in Tokyo, Japan and Redwood City, California is a biotechnology company that develops innovative scientific instruments based on integrated, multidisciplinary technologies to enable life science research, diagnostics, and therapeutic development. The company’s flagship product, VisionSort, is the world’s first AI-based, dual-mode fluorescence and morphometric cell sorting platform and it partners with major global biopharmaceutical companies and leading academic research institutes to further drive groundbreaking research. For more information, please visit www.thinkcyte.com.
To learn more about research partnerships or other partnering opportunities with ThinkCyte, email contact@thinkcyte.com.
