Naveen Jain
BlueDot CEO Naveen Jain at his office in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire photo)

BELLEVUE, Wash.BlueDot, the “innovation factory” founded by serial tech entrepreneur Naveen Jain, says it has completed a $10.1 million Series A funding round with an assist from the likes of XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis.

Jain told GeekWire that Diamandis’ breakthrough investment fund, Bold Capital Partners, is among the participants in the round. So is Soma Somasegar, a former Microsoft executive who is now a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group. And so is CerraCap Ventures, a fund that made a splash late last year with its investment in Special Occasions, NDTV’s online wedding planning platform in India.

“Bold Capital, CerraCap Ventures, I and many other successful executives and entrepreneurs invested in the round,” Jain, who was born in India, confirmed in an email today. He said the round valued BlueDot at $60 million.

Jain has been involved in a long list of ventures – including InfoSpace, Intelius and TalentWise. He currently serves as a member of the XPRIZE board of trustees, as co-founder and chairman of Moon Express, which is planning to send a commercial space mission to the moon next year – and as BlueDot’s CEO at its Bellevue headquarters.

BlueDot’s mission is to turn research in health and technology into profit-making products. Jain has said the venture would license technologies developed at academic and governmental research centers, and then put together management teams to build companies around those technologies. BlueDot would own the companies, but the research centers would receive royalties from sales.

“If you can find a technology that can help a billion people, there’s no doubt in my mind that you can create a $10 billion company,” Jain told GeekWire in April as the funding round was proceeding.

Jain has said that BlueDot’s first technological targets would be device-charging systems that harvest ambient energy, and non-invasive medical devices that can detect pathogens.

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