Building the Front-End for Every Sequencer with Volta Labs CEO Udayan Umapathi

As sequencing continues to become cheaper, more attention is being paid to sample prep. Today we’re following up with the company, Volta Labs, a genomics applications company transforming sample prep for NGS by increasing robustness and precision, and lowering operating costs. CEO Udayan Umapathi reflects on what has been a breakout first commercial year for Callisto, the company’s sequencer-agnostic, digital-fluidics platform for sample prep. When he was last on the show, Callisto had just launched. One year later, it is deployed across North America, Europe, and Asia, with rapid uptake in clinical labs, pediatric oncology centers, and high-throughput sequencing sites.

Udayan says the scale of adoption surprised even the team. “We said we wanted to be the front end of every sequencing technology. We’ve actually done that,” he notes, adding that more than ten applications now support short- and long-read sequencing.

What’s driving the momentum? Three things keep coming up from customers: true walk-away automation, the ability to run any chemistry on any sequencer, and major improvements in quality and cost. Labs without automation engineers can now “simply buy a kit and run software…without having to learn sample prep,” Udayan explains.

A standout story this year has been pediatric oncology, where whole-genome sequencing and hybrid-capture workflows have shown strong performance on Callisto. Customers such as Prinses Máxima Center and UMC Utrecht are using the platform across Illumina, Oxford Nanopore, Ultima, and other chemistries, achieving the sequencer-agnostic vision Volta set out from the start.

Looking ahead, Udayan sees sequencing as still early in its evolution and believes sample prep has vast room for innovation. “One platform to do Illumina, one platform to do Oxford Nanopore, one platform to do Ultima… long read, short read—we do it all,” he says.

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