DNAnexus, a DNA data management and analysis platform, has secured USD15 million in second-round funding, led by Google Ventures and TPG Biotech.
Additional participants in this round of financing include institutional investors First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, K9 Ventures, and Felicis Ventures. The new capital will help further DNAnexus’ mission to unlock the potential of DNA-based medicine and biotechnology by creating scalable and collaborative data technologies. The company intends to use the funds to expand hiring and accelerate product development.
With this investment, Krishna Yeshwant, MD and partner at Google Ventures, and Geoff Duyk, partner and managing director at TPG Biotech, have joined DNAnexus’ board, which also includes the company co-founders — Andreas Sundquist, Arend Sidow, and Serafim Batzoglou — and Rob Hayes from First Round Capital.
Simultaneously, the company announced a technology collaboration with Google Inc. to provide access to the most comprehensive archive of publicly available DNA data through a hosted Sequence Read Archive (SRA) site. After the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), the main U.S. host of public genomic data, announced in February 2011 that it would phase-out support of the SRA due to federal funding cuts, DNAnexus selected Google Cloud Storage ( http://code.google.com/apis/storage/ ) to host the database and continue to provide access to the medical research community. Leveraging Google’s industry leading cloud infrastructure, DNAnexus has also developed a new, user-friendly interface for the database that will improve the ability for scientists to browse, download, and analyze data. The SRA represents one of the largest datasets deposited in Google Cloud Storage by any outside organisation.
"We are at a pivotal time in the field of genomics, with data growing exponentially," says Andreas Sundquist, CEO, DNAnexus. "In less than five years, the cost of DNA sequencing will be on par with the cost of other routine lab tests, bringing it in reach of almost everyone in the developed world. DNAnexus will bring together the data and the tools to allow the medical and biotech community to extract meaning. We are thrilled to be working with premier life sciences and technology investors TPG Biotech and Google Ventures, and excited to expand our technology team and our products designed to help power the genomics revolution."
"At Google Ventures, we’re passionate about tackling the world’s most challenging and important problems. Our investment in DNAnexus is a manifestation of that belief. Their vision of revolutionising the field of bioinformatics is extremely compelling, and has the potential to change DNA management and analysis. Our experience working with large and complex data sets makes us truly enthusiastic about both the SRA collaboration with Google and the Google Ventures investment," says Krishna Yeshwant, partner, Google Ventures.
DNAnexus solves the growing problems associated with storing and managing large sets of DNA data, through its web-based solution that allows medical researchers to visualise and analyse datasets from a single, unified system. "We believe there’s a tremendous opportunity to build an ecosystem for users to manage their genomics data and enable collaboration on a distributed, cloud-based platform," said Geoff Duyk, partner at TPG Biotech.
DNAnexus is focused on delivering the definitive big data system for DNA to both the commercial and academic communities. A cloud-based solution, DNAnexus provides instant online genomics data centers for sequencing operations and research organisations of virtually any size without any required hardware investment on the part of the customer.
