Sign in Subscribe
Western Hemisphere

Doroth Raises US$4.5 Million to Build Latin America's First Microfluidic Chip Plant and Cut Crop Diagnostics to Minutes

The Editor

The Editor

— 4 min read
Share
Samuel Oliveira (Doroth), Eduardo Araújo (Loccus) Camilla Amaral (Doroth), Luiz Okano (Doroth/S4 Consultoria) and Rodrigo Gurdos (Doroth)
Samuel Oliveira (Doroth), Eduardo Araújo (Loccus) Camilla Amaral (Doroth), Luiz Okano (Doroth/S4 Consultoria) and Rodrigo Gurdos (Doroth)

Doroth, a Brazilian deeptech based in Piracicaba, São Paulo, raised about US$4.5 million (R$23 million) in a round led by Loccus, a Brazilian manufacturer of laboratory instruments and molecular diagnostics equipment. The round was announced on September 1, 2026 and combines private capital with non-dilutive funding from Finep, the federal innovation agency, and Fapesp, the São Paulo state research foundation. MOA Ventures structured the transaction for Loccus and S4 Consultoria advised Doroth.

Founded in 2019, Doroth builds lab-on-a-chip systems that compress molecular biology, microfluidics, electronics, optics and automation into portable devices. They identify pathogens, microorganisms, genetically modified organisms and antimicrobial resistance genes in samples taken from leaves, seeds, grains, milk, meat and disease-carrying mosquitoes. Rodrigo Gurdos, founder and director of new business, said the money will fund what he described as Latin America's first microfluidic chip factory, with capacity for up to 4 million chips a year, robotic assembly, in-house production of lyophilized reagent beads and proprietary enzymes for qPCR, LAMP and Extreme PCR, the last of which the company says returns results in under five minutes. Eduardo Araújo is Loccus's chief executive; Camilla Amaral and Samuel Oliveira also represent Doroth in the deal. Before this round, Doroth had raised roughly US$840,000 (R$4.3 million) in angel and seed capital, including about US$390,000 (R$2 million) led by AgroVen in February 2022.

Market Context

The strategic logic is manufacturing, not software. Loccus already produces PCR systems, electrophoresis equipment and lab automation hardware in Brazil, and it runs a corporate venture arm with MOA Ventures and the SENAI Innovation Institute targeting bio-inputs and molecular diagnostics. Doroth supplies the science and the chip design; Loccus supplies the industrial capacity to make them at volume. That combination is rare in Brazilian agtech, where most capital has gone to software layers sitting on top of imported hardware.

The funding environment makes the round notable for its shape rather than its size. Brazil holds 83% of Latin America's roughly 977 agtech startups, but venture investment in the sector fell from R$2.1 billion in 2021 to R$1.3 billion in 2023, and capital since then has moved toward companies with defensible science instead of growth stories. PwC Brasil counted 60 agribusiness mergers and acquisitions between January and November 2025, up 15 percentage points year over year, and expects that pace to continue in 2026. A strategic manufacturer leading a round, with development-bank money alongside it, is what the sector's financing now looks like.

The Number

"We will have the first microfluidic chip industry in Latin America, with capacity to produce up to 4 million chips a year." — Rodrigo Gurdos, founder and director of new business, Doroth

Regional Relevance

For the United States, the relevance runs through supply chains and standards. Brazil is the largest exporter of soybeans, beef, coffee, sugar and poultry, and American food companies, feed buyers and commodity traders sit downstream of Brazilian sanitary and phytosanitary practice. A cheaper, faster way to detect pathogens and antimicrobial resistance genes at the farm gate changes what can be documented about that supply, which matters to any US buyer facing its own traceability requirements. It also puts a Latin American producer into a diagnostics equipment market that has been dominated by American and European suppliers such as Thermo Fisher, Bio-Rad and Qiagen.

For Brazil, the immediate pressure is regulatory. The European Union has demanded evidence that Brazilian livestock producers control veterinary antibiotic use, with traceability and biosecurity documentation attached, and analysts have put roughly US$1.8 billion in exports at risk if Brazil cannot demonstrate compliance. Testing for resistance genes in milk and meat is exactly the gap that creates. The Mercosur-EU trade agreement, covering a bloc of about 718 million people, adds sustainability and traceability conditions that will require the same kind of verification at scale.

Building the chips domestically is the part with the longest tail. Brazilian labs currently import most consumables for molecular testing, which exposes cost and availability to exchange rates and shipping. A plant producing 4 million chips a year in São Paulo state, with enzymes made in-house, substitutes imports in a category the country has never manufactured. Whether it reaches that capacity is another question, but the attempt itself is unusual for the region.

The Other Side

Is US$4.5 million enough to build a chip plant? Microfluidic manufacturing needs cleanrooms, precision tooling, quality systems and validation, and 4 million units a year is an industrial target rather than a pilot line. Loccus's existing facilities may absorb much of that cost, which would explain the modest headline figure, but it also means the factory depends on a partner's balance sheet rather than the round itself.

Who buys 4 million chips a year? Doroth reports monitoring more than 60,000 hectares for around 45 clients. Filling that capacity requires either a much larger agricultural customer base or a second market, most plausibly human health or veterinary diagnostics. The company has not said which, and building a plant ahead of demand is how deeptech hardware companies most often run out of money.

Does speed win when the alternative is cheap? Extreme PCR results in under five minutes is a real technical claim, but conventional lab testing in Brazil is inexpensive and producers are price-sensitive. The buyers who will pay for speed are the ones facing a deadline or a regulator, which points back to export compliance. That makes Doroth's commercial case partly dependent on the EU keeping the pressure on.

Sources & Transparency

Read more