Lightcast raised $27 million to help commercialize its Envisia platform for massively parallel droplet-based single-cell functional assays. The Cambridge, UK-based company plans to use the funding to expand adoption of Envisia across drug discovery and life science research, where functional readouts are increasingly valued beyond transcriptomics alone. The Envisia platform targets the gap between single-cell measurement and scalable, functional perturbation or phenotyping workflows. Lightcast’s financing reflects investor focus on tools that reduce time-to-insight for mechanistic biology and target validation. For biotech operators, platforms that can connect genotype or perturbations to cellular function are particularly relevant as companies look to de-risk candidate selection earlier in translational programs.