John Stuepelnagel and Maverick Ventures, a venture capital firm, led a $20m Series A round in Volta Labs, a bioautomation company developing solutions to streamline the upstream workflows in genomic sequencing, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Casdin Capital, E14 Funds, and Blindspot Ventures. “Sequencing costs have plummeted, but sample preparation costs have stagnated. Volta’s end-to-end automated approach will address the sample preparation bottleneck and enable further market adoption in sequencing. We believe Udayan and the Volta team’s digital fluidic approach will ultimately enable a broad range of workflows in genomics, proteomics, and synthetic biology to be automated,” David Singer, Maverick Ventures Managing Partner.