Funding profile · Molecular imaging

Bikanta

One seed round, no Form D on file, no federal grant, and a round that never closed. The capital record for Bikanta is short, and the gaps in it are the story.

$120KTotal funding on record, one seed round dated Jul 16, 2014 (Tracxn)
$20KTotal raised on a competing database record (CB Insights)
0Form D notices filed, and zero EDGAR documents naming the company
$0Federal award dollars in NIH RePORTER and the NSF award database

Data as of September 23, 2026. Company-reported and database-reported figures are labeled.

Rounds at a glance

When Round Amount Investors Source
Summer 2014 Y Combinator, Summer 2014 batch Not disclosed in any located source Y Combinator YC, press
Jul 16, 2014 Seed, per a database record $120,000 total, one round Y Combinator Tracxn
2014 to 2015 Seed, investor list only Amount not shown in the archived record Y Combinator; QueensBridge Venture Partners; Marc Bell Ventures; Nasir “Nas” Jones; Christer Andersson Crunchbase, 2019 archive
Undated Total raised, competing database figure $20,000 Not named Conflicts with Tracxn
2018 Raise for preclinical and clinical work Target not disclosed None named Founder interview
By about 2019 Round not completed, company dissolved “a partial amount of money and not enough to close out the full round” Not named Founder interview
2013 to 2019 Federal grants $0 None NIH, NSF

What the filings show

Bikanta Corporation · no Form D · SEC EDGAR checked Sep 23, 2026

Company search
No matching companies for the name Bikanta
Full text search
Zero documents containing the word Bikanta
Offerings noticed
None
Investment vehicles
No SPV or fund filing naming the company
Reading
Money was raised, so it moved outside Regulation D or without a notice

National Institutes of Health · Federal Register notice · published Jun 16, 2014

Citation
79 FR 34323, document 2014-14037
Licensee
Bikanta Corporation, a Delaware corporation, 6694 Cedar Boulevard, Newark CA 94560
Inventions
HHS Ref. E-175-2012/0, method for preparing silica coated nanodiamonds; HHS Ref. E-261-2012, background free imaging by magnetic modulation
Applications
Provisionals 61/672,996 and 61/711,702; PCT/US2013/050779; US 14/049,096
Assignee
The United States of America
Field of use
Imaging devices and systems, and sales of silica coated probes for non-clinical uses, term not to exceed five years
Terms
Exclusive, worldwide, royalty bearing, under 35 U.S.C. 209

Reading the filings

  1. The balance sheet was a license, not a patent estate.The two inventions the company was built on were assigned to the United States. Bikanta held a term limited exclusive license to them. When the company stopped, there was nothing to sell: the founder says the technology and the IP went back to NIH.
  2. The two database totals cannot both be right.Tracxn records $120,000 in one seed round dated July 16, 2014. CB Insights records $20,000 total raised. The gap is six to one, and neither figure comes from a filing. The $120,000 figure matches the standard Y Combinator investment of that era, which makes it the more plausible of the two, but no primary document confirms either.
  3. Named investors exist, dollar amounts do not.A 2019 archive of the company’s Crunchbase page lists five participants in a single seed round: Y Combinator, QueensBridge Venture Partners, Marc Bell Ventures, Nasir “Nas” Jones and Christer Andersson. The archive captures the investor table but no money raised figure. Five checks with no disclosed total is the shape of an accelerator round topped up by angels.
  4. No Form D, which is not the same as no money.SEC company search and full text search both return nothing for Bikanta as of September 23, 2026. Companies that raise under Section 4(a)(2) rather than Regulation D file no Form D, and small accelerator rounds frequently go unnoticed. The absence removes the one document that would have settled the amount.
  5. The company took no federal money of its own.Zero NIH awards and zero NSF awards, for a company whose entire technology came out of an NIH intramural lab. No SBIR Phase I, no Phase II. What it used instead was free capacity: instrumentation at the Molecular Foundry, a Department of Energy user facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which the founder described in December 2015 as the source of the majority of the company’s instruments.
  6. The ending has a date range, not a date.Databases put the founding at 2013 and the founder put it at 2014. She said in March 2021 that the company lasted five and a half years, which places the dissolution somewhere between mid 2018 and 2020. The last independent write ups are from 2018. Her State Department role began in December 2019.

Commercial signals

Signal Detail Source type
Regulatory No FDA 510(k) and no premarket approval. No registered clinical trial. Public record
Revenue line Fourteen reagent SKUs in a 2017 catalog, at 40 and 100 nanometers, with biotin, carboxyl, azide, amine and silica surfaces. Pricing by inquiry. No customer or revenue figure found. Company-stated
Instruments Microscopes, gel scanners, animal imagers and a handheld device, described as prototypes. None launched. Company-stated
Facilities Operated from the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which a 2017 paper gives as an author affiliation. Public record
Validation Three peer reviewed nanodiamond papers, 2013 to 2017. The imaging paper reports up to 100-fold signal to background improvement in mice. Public record
Status CB Insights records that the company ceased operations. The bikanta.com domain resolves but does not answer. Database, direct check

What to watch

  • Any new Federal Register notice relicensing E-175-2012 or E-261-2012. The inventions are back with a federal owner.
  • Whether a later company files a Form D naming the same NIH technology numbers.
  • Whether the 2017 immune cell result draws a follow on program at an academic center.

The Bikanta story on Healthcare DiscoveryHealthcare Discovery

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  • Segmed: Also in Diagnostics. A Palo Alto company that collects medical scans from hospitals under revenue sharing deals, strips the identifiers, and sells the result to AI developers and drug
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  • Delee: Also in Diagnostics. A Monterrey team built a machine that filters circulating tumor cells out of whole blood, published two papers on it, and raised about $2.75 million

Sources

  1. Public recordProspective Grant of Exclusive License for Silica-Coated Fluorescent Nanodiamond ProbesFederal Register, 79 FR 34323 · Jun 16, 2014
  2. Public recordNo Form D, no company record, no full text hit for BikantaSEC EDGAR · Sep 23, 2026
  3. Public recordNo award records for BikantaNIH RePORTER and NSF awards · Sep 23, 2026
  4. Public recordImaging Methods and Computer-Readable Media, E-261-2012-0-US-01NIH Office of Technology Transfer · accessed Sep 23, 2026
  5. Public recordThree nanodiamond papers, JACS 2013, Biomedical Optics Express 2014, Nanomedicine 2017PubMed · accessed Sep 23, 2026
  6. DatabaseBikanta funding record, $120K in one seed roundTracxn · accessed Sep 23, 2026
  7. DatabaseBikanta company record, total raised $20K, ceased operationsCB Insights · accessed Sep 23, 2026
  8. DatabaseBikanta seed round investor listCrunchbase, Internet Archive capture · Feb 2019
  9. InterviewEpisode 17 with Ambika BumbThe Bioinformatics CRO Podcast · Mar 16, 2021
  10. IndependentMicroscopic Diamonds Are Lighting The Way to Early Cancer DetectionInternational Business Times UK · Aug 18, 2014
  11. IndependentYC Demo Day Session 1TechCrunch · Aug 19, 2014
  12. CompanyProducts and technology pages, 2017 capturesbikanta.com, Internet Archive
  13. CompanyA Nano Step For Man, A Giant Leap For MankindTechCrunch column by Ambika Bumb · Dec 23, 2015

Compiled from SEC, NIH, NSF and Federal Register public records and published reports as of September 23, 2026. No Form D notice exists for this company; the funding figures shown come from commercial databases and are labeled as such. Healthcare Venture Capital Fund holds no position in Bikanta. This page is not an offer to sell or a recommendation to buy any security.