Our story

Built at the intersection of clinical microbiology and machine learning

Nanolix was founded in Pittsburgh in 2023. UPMC's infectious disease infrastructure and Carnegie Mellon's computational biology depth are in our DNA.

The problem Dr. Holm kept seeing

Dr. Astrid Holm spent years working in clinical bioinformatics before founding Nanolix. She watched nanopore sequencing evolve from a long-read research curiosity into hardware capable of sitting on a benchtop next to a patient's room — compact, relatively inexpensive, and genuinely capable of identifying pathogens from raw sample in real time.

The hardware problem was largely solved. The software problem wasn't. Every serious basecalling pipeline in clinical use required either cloud infrastructure or reference-genome-trained models that systematically underperformed on the modified bases and strain diversity you actually encounter in a hospital microbiology laboratory.

The clinical opportunity was obvious: a fully local analysis stack, purpose-built for the pathogen diversity and error profiles of clinical specimens, designed to run on a workstation inside the lab rather than a server farm a continent away.

"We built Nanolix because the 45-minute window is real — the technology exists — and the software layer was the only thing preventing it from reaching the patients who needed it most."

— Dr. Astrid Holm, CEO & Co-Founder
2023 Founded in Pittsburgh, PA
5 Team members — clinical bioinformaticians and ML engineers
<45 min Time-to-result demonstrated on internal test panel
zero Cloud dependency in the analysis critical path

Why Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh is home to two assets that directly shaped Nanolix: UPMC — one of the largest academic medical centers in the United States, with deep clinical microbiology expertise and a culture of translational research — and Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, which has one of the strongest computational biology programs in the country.

Our location at 600 Grant Street places us at the center of Pittsburgh's health sciences corridor. The clinical access and validation partnerships we've built are only possible in an environment where hospital leadership and computational biology researchers are a short walk apart.

  • UPMC — academic medical center, infectious disease infrastructure, translational research culture
  • Carnegie Mellon SCS — computational biology depth, ML engineering talent pipeline
  • University of Pittsburgh — infectious disease division, clinical microbiology expertise
Pittsburgh skyline at dusk viewed from the rivers
"The 45-minute window can change clinical decisions. We build the software that makes that window real in the laboratory setting it matters most."

Nanolix — Pittsburgh, PA — founded 2023

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