Spiral Genetics, a Seattle-based bioinformatics company, has raised $3 million led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
PRESS RELEASE:
Spiral Genetics, a cloud-based big data bioinformatics company, announced today that it closed its Series A financing, led by venture capital firm DFJ. The new capital will help further Spiral Genetics’ mission to create revolutionary tools that empower the bioinformatics community to solve the large-scale genomic data challenges of tomorrow. The company intends to use the funds to expand its bioinformatics engineering team, scale its sales and marketing efforts and accelerate product development.
In addition to its funding, Spiral announced its partnership with Omicia, a developer of scalable and fully integrated informatics systems specifically designed to interpret human genome sequences for research and clinical applications. The partnership leverages Omicia’s Opal solution which is a variant analysis tool that empowers researchers and clinicians to analyze genomes and prioritize disease-causing variants.
“Our partnership with Spiral Genetics allows faster and more accurate interpretation of human genomes for clinical relevance; a critical bottleneck for adoption of genome into clinical care and laboratory testing. In combination with Omicia’s Opal system, our partnership will move us closer to a seamless solution from raw sequence data to clinically relevant genomic variants. Speed and user friendliness are critical for adoption of human genome sequencing” stated Martin G. Reese, Ph.D, Co-Founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer Omicia. The Opal tool is used by CLIA labs and clinical researchers and in combination with Spiral’s platform is providing same day analysis from raw reads to produce clinically relevant findings.
“Innovations in DNA sequencing have led to an explosion of data, which presents an enormous market opportunity,” said Rachel Pike of DFJ. “These developments are only accelerating and will have real and lasting implications on drug development, R&D in agriculture, and biological production of chemicals and fuels. Spiral Genetics is a solution that will both manage and draw insight from these data, enabling the industry to keep up with constantly-accelerating technological progress.”
The Spiral Platform offers the fastest cloud-based bioinformatics analysis available today. Their breakthrough approach accelerates the data processing time from days to hours, shrinking the analysis time for a whole human genome at 40x coverage to 3 hours.
“We are thrilled to be backed by DFJ,” stated Adina Mangubat, CEO of Spiral Genetics. “DFJ has consistently invested in industry leaders whose technologies are changing critical industry sectors. As more academic researchers, agro-genomic and pharmaceutical companies increase their use of genomic data, there’s no doubt that a large-scale focused bioinformatics toolkit to process and analyze genomic data will be vital and we are excited to be at the forefront of developing new solutions to these challenges.”
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