Life science tools · Genomic sample preparation
Volta Labs
An MIT spinout that prepares DNA for sequencing by walking droplets across a circuit board instead of pipetting them between plates. Its Callisto instrument has shipped since September 2024 and now runs in clinical genome labs in New York, Utrecht, Amsterdam and Oslo.
The minifridge at AGBT
In February 2024, at the Advances in Genome Biology and Technology meeting in Orlando, Volta Labs put a box on a bench and switched it on. Roughly the size of a minifridge, it took up to 24 samples, loaded four at a time, and ran a protocol from raw material to sequencing library with nobody at its elbow.
Inside, almost nothing moved the way lab automation usually moves. There is a robotic arm, but it only loads and unloads reagents. The chemistry happens on a grid of electrodes under a disposable plastic film. Charge one electrode, discharge its neighbor, and a droplet walks. Add magnets and tightly held temperature and you can pull DNA out of blood, fragment it, ligate adapters and wash beads. The instrument is called Callisto, and it listed at $125,000.
The step nobody optimized
Sequencing got cheap faster than Moore’s Law. The step before it did not.
“The entire world could not sequence a single human genome 20 years ago, and today, I as a non biologist can sequence a human genome in a day or two on a bench,” founder and chief executive Udayan Umapathi told TechCrunch in 2022. Sample prep, he said, had almost been neglected. Conventional prep runs on a liquid handling robot: a mechanical arm carrying pipette tips between plastic plates. MIT News described such rigs in 2021 as “systems of separate data silos that lack integration and rely on expensive consumables.”
The category also has a graveyard. Illumina bought Advanced Liquid Logic in 2013, launched an electrowetting prep instrument called NeoPrep in 2015, and discontinued it two years later, reportedly for poor performance. Miroculus launched Miro Canvas in 2022 and was acquired by Integra Biosciences the year after.
Two engineers out of the Media Lab
Umapathi came to the MIT Media Lab after engineering liquid handling systems at a synthetic biology company, where he decided that scaling automation was the field’s real pain point. Advised by Hiroshi Ishii, Neil Gershenfeld and Joseph M. Jacobson, he used programmable water droplets to automate biology.
“What I noticed was that the existing technologies for moving, mixing and heating fluids were archaic,” he said of that 2015 work. “I realized if we have to do biology at scale, automation for biology has to be built from the ground up.”
His co-founder Will Langford came from the Center for Bits and Atoms, where he assembled robots out of millimeter scale parts to make engineering behave more like biology. At Volta he turned the arrow around. The company was incorporated in Delaware in 2018, went through Y Combinator in Winter 2019, and now builds in Boston’s Seaport.
A year and a half late
On March 17, 2022 Volta announced a $20 million Series A led by Maverick Ventures, joined by Khosla Ventures, Casdin Capital, E14 Funds, Blindspot Ventures, Illumina co-founder John Stuelpnagel, 23andMe chief executive Anne Wojcicki and Kapa Biosystems co-founder Paul McEwan. The instrument then sat with four partners Umapathi would not name, and he expected a commercial product in 2023.
That is not what happened. Callisto was introduced on February 1, 2024, with shipments expected that spring. The first customer shipment was announced on September 10, 2024, to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Depending on where the clock starts, the slip runs between one year and two. The company used it: 24 hires in 2023 doubled the team to about 50, seven global patents were filed, and it said 10,000 samples went through the platform that year.
Where the boxes went
Mount Sinai was first, for PacBio long read work under Robert Sebra. UMC Utrecht followed in February 2025, moving whole genome sequencing based prenatal and postnatal testing onto Callisto. Hartwig Medical Foundation in Amsterdam signed a multi year oncology collaboration in May 2025. The Norwegian Sequencing Centre at the University of Oslo took the first Nordic instrument in July 2025. Broad Clinical Labs and Ginkgo Bioworks were named early access collaborators.
The menu widened with the installed base. By November 2025 Volta listed seven validated whole genome applications across Illumina, Oxford Nanopore, PacBio, Element Biosciences and Ultima Genomics sequencers. In May 2026 Oxford Nanopore admitted Volta to its Compatible Products Programme.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| FDA records | None. Searches on the name return Volta Medical, an unrelated company. Callisto applications are Research Use Only. | Public record |
| Trials, papers, grants | No registered studies, no PubMed results attributable to the company, and no NIH or NSF awards as of Sep 22, 2026. All disclosed capital is private. | Not found |
| SEC Form D filings | Three under CIK 0001914755. Mar 3, 2022: $25,034,971 offered and sold, 24 investors, first sale Jan 27, 2022. Jan 12, 2024: $9,000,001 offered, $4,260,001 sold, 4 investors. Amended Mar 22, 2024: $20,000,001 offered, $12,681,692 sold, 15 investors. | Public record |
| Third party benchmarking | At AGBT in Feb 2024, Broad Clinical Labs reported that on 12 blood samples run through a beta prototype, short read data showed “equivalent sensitivity and specificity performance” against the Broad’s standard clinical genome workflow, with processing time roughly halved. | Independent |
| Named clinical users | Mount Sinai (Sep 2024), UMC Utrecht (Feb 2025), Hartwig Medical Foundation (May 2025), Norwegian Sequencing Centre (Jul 2025). Instrument counts and revenue are not disclosed. | Company-stated |
| Long read evaluation | A UMC Utrecht evaluation presented at AGBT 2026 reported up to 120 gigabases from one PromethION flow cell and 99.66 percent single nucleotide variant recall, in workflows aligned to ISO 15189. Not peer reviewed. | Company-stated |
| Sequencing vendor programs | Oxford Nanopore Compatible Products Programme, May 2026. Kits validated across Illumina, PacBio, Element, Ultima, New England Biolabs, Twist, QIAGEN and Watchmaker. The Roche AXELIOS 1 integration is stated as a goal, not a shipped product. | Partner-stated |
| Timeline versus plan | In March 2022 the company pointed to a commercial product in 2023 and a limited release at the end of 2022. Callisto launched Feb 2024 and first shipped Sep 2024. A February 2025 release dates those first shipments to August 2024, a month before the announcement reporting them. | Differs from record |
Read plainly: the proof here is commercial, not clinical. Four named institutions run the instrument in production, one says it has processed thousands of patient samples, and an independent core lab says the data matches its own pipeline. Missing: a peer reviewed comparison, disclosed revenue, and any public count of installed instruments.
What to watch
- A peer reviewed publication. Every performance number in circulation, including the 99.66 percent recall figure, comes from a release or a conference suite.
- Whether the Roche AXELIOS 1 work moves from presented to shipped.
- Repeat orders. UMC Utrecht says it is expanding its footprint, without numbers.
- A new Form D. Nothing has been filed under the company CIK since March 2024.
In their words
“The entire world could not sequence a single human genome 20 years ago, and today, I as a non biologist can sequence a human genome in a day or two on a bench.”
Udayan Umapathi, founder and CEO, TechCrunch, 2022 · Independent
“I realized if we have to do biology at scale, automation for biology has to be built from the ground up.”
Udayan Umapathi, TechCrunch, 2022 · Independent
“I see Volta as an opportunity to flip that on its head and use automation to treat biology more like engineering.”
Will Langford, co-founder, MIT News, 2021 · Independent
“You can’t have a system that operates in 384-well plates running three samples.”
Brendan Blumenstiel, Broad Clinical Labs, GenomeWeb, 2024 · Independent
“If they have actually packaged it into a nice box that is easy to use, I’m excited about it.”
Winston Timp, Johns Hopkins University, early access user, GenomeWeb, 2024 · Independent
“If we’re going to put sequencers everywhere, we need to be able to do sample prep everywhere.”
John Stuelpnagel, Illumina co-founder and investor, launch release, 2024 · Company release
“We haven’t found an effective way to scale and automate long-read whole genome sample preparation as effectively as we can with Volta’s Callisto platform.”
Robert Sebra, Mount Sinai, launch release, 2024 · Company release
“Since partnering with Volta Labs over a year ago, we’ve successfully deployed Callisto in our diagnostic environment and processed thousands of patient samples.”
Bert Van der Zwaag, UMC Utrecht, AGBT 2026 release · Company release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, Volta Labs, Inc., CIK 0001914755
- Public recordForm D and Form D/A, Volta Labs, Inc.
- Public recordForm D, E14 SPV Volta Labs A, LLC
- Public recordFDA 510(k), PMA, PubMed, NIH and NSF searches on the company name
- IndependentVolta Labs grabs $20 million to address a growing genomics bottleneck
- IndependentVolta Labs Raises $20M in Series A Financing Round
- IndependentVolta Labs Launches Electrowetting-Based Automated NGS Sample Prep Platform
- IndependentVolta Labs: Improving workflows for genetic applications
- IndependentVolta Labs Unveils 2025 Application Roadmap for NGS Sample Prep
- CompanyVolta Labs Launches Callisto to Revolutionize Genomics and Sample Prep
- CompanyVolta Labs Announces First Customer Shipments and Expanding Preloaded App Menu
- CompanyUMC Utrecht adopts Volta Labs Callisto Sample Prep System
- CompanyCallisto Now Unifies the Entire WGS Ecosystem on One Platform
- CompanyAutomated library preparation for the Oxford Nanopore Ligation Sequencing Kit V14
- CompanyVolta Labs vision page, Mount Sinai installation blog and 2024 review blog
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
