III: TechBio Latest Summer News & Updates
III: TechBio Latest Summer News & Updates
Trends on TechBio ⛽: Dotmatics, Seqera Labs, Mi Laboratories, Speed Invest, Flinn, PipeBio, Databricks, VeriSIM Life, neoX Biotech, SandboxAQ and Okomera
This week’s Trilogy:
Trends on TechBio ⛽: Lantern, Asimov, Scriptome, Insitro, Xtalpi (Ailux), Eurofins, Basecamp, X-Chem, Verseon and Top 10 Swiss AI Healthcare Startups
II: TechBio Latest Summer News & Updates
Trends on TechBio ⛽: Ignition, Terray, SmartCADD, Iktos, TxGNN, IPA, Aigen, Benevolent, VedTechBio, 1910 Genetics, BullFrog, Antiverse, Alleo, Cernais, Longenesis, DeepMind and AZ (MILTON)
III: TechBio Latest Summer News & Updates
Trends on TechBio ⛽: Dotmatics, Seqera Labs, Mi Laboratories, Speed Invest, Flinn, PipeBio, Databricks, VeriSIM Life, neoX Biotech, SandboxAQ and Okomera
III: TechBio Latest Summer News & Updates
Dotmatics
On October 22, 2024, the Boston-based company Dotmatics launched 🔶 Geneious Luma, a powerful new bioinformatics solution for antibody discovery, built on its Luma Scientific Intelligence Platform (Dotmatics debuts antibody engineering R&D software platform). It’s the first part of what the company describes will grow to become a multimodal suite for biopharma researchers that will span antibody-drug conjugates, CRISPR-based treatments, CAR-T cell therapies and siRNA drugs as well as vaccines.
Dotmatics (US, founded in 2005 in the UK) is the global leader in R&D scientific software that connects science, data and decision-making. Combining a workflow and data platform with best-of-breed applications, they offer true end-to-end solutions for biology, chemistry, formulations, data management, flow cytometry and more. Dotmatics is trusted by more than 2 million researchers from the world’s leading biopharma, chemicals and materials enterprises and academic institutions.
Their platform Luma—a Data Management Cloud—connects all your R&D data in one place and connects all your instrument data. Recently (Boston, April 11, 2024), they announced the launch of Luma Lab Connect, which unlocks the untapped value of Lab Instrument Data to accelerate scientific R&D decision-making.
They are offering solutions for Biology, Chemistry and Chemicals & Materials like CAR-T therapy, RNA therapy, Antibody Discovery and Chemistry Design. At the core of their scientific breakthroughs you can find R&D softwares like:
🔶 Graphpad: a versatile statistics tool purpose-built for scientists. Graphpad Prism is industry-leading software that simplifies the analysis, graphing and presenting of scientific research.
🔶 Geneious Prime and Geneious Biologics are intuitive yet powerful software applications that provide DNA data analysis and visualization.
🔶 SnapGene is the world’s most popular cloning tool offering the easiest way to plan, visualize and document core molecular biology procedures.
🔶 Statsols is the owner of nQuery, the world’s most trusted clinical trial design platform and proprietary sample size software.
🔶 De Novo's FCS Express is a fully integrated analysis, statistics, graphing and reporting tool, focused on turning raw flow cytometry and image cytometry data into presentation-ready results.
🔶 LabArchives is a best-in-class Electronic Lab Notebook data management solution that enables scientists to easily document data, prove and protect discovery, and collaborate in a secure environment.
🔶 Protein Metrics is the leading provider of proteomics analysis software that allows scientists to perform highly-accurate analyses on the data generated from all major commercially available mass spectrometry platforms.
🔶 OMIQ is a modern cytometry analysis platform that bridges the world of ML and analytical pipelines with that of classical manual analysis, allowing researchers to go from raw data to statistical significance in one software.
🔶 SoftGenetics bioinformatics software offers a range of advanced genetic analysis products for research, forensics and healthcare applications.
Dotmatics is backed by Insight Partners, the global venture capital and private equity firm, that has made 11 acquisitions since late 2017, with half of them taking place in 2021 alone.
Seqera Labs
Seqera, a provider of scientific data analysis for life sciences and creator of Nextflow, announced the acquisition of tinybio, a rising tech-bio startup specializing in AI-powered bioinformatics tools (Seqera Acquires Tinybio for AI-Powered Bioinformatics). tinybio is a New York City based startup focused on the application of generally available generative AI technologies to help bioinformaticians and researchers. It was started by Sasha Dagayev and Vishal Patel in 2022. To date, the company has helped thousands of researchers to resolve hundreds of thousands of bioinformatics issues.
Seqera Labs (founded in 2018 in Barcelona a spin-off of the Centre for Genomic Regulation, CRG) is a bioinformatics company developing technologies for data pipelines. Founded by Evan Floden and Paolo di Tommaso, its services are largely related to the open-source software Nextflow (for writing data pipeline workflows) that was released in 2013.
Nextflow is an excellent solution for many ML-based scenarios for continuously (and automatically) retraining your models based on rapidly-changing datasets from external sources such as sequencers. For training and inference resources sporadically where you face constraints getting GPUs or FPGAs – even for short periods and often pipelines like nf-core/proteinfold have compute and data-intensive inference steps where many samples need to be processed in parallel. These kinds of challenges can be addressed using Nextflow and the Seqera Platform integrated with AWS. In 2023, Seqera Labs (that is a government-owned company) and Genomics England announced a partnership aimed at advancing genomic research analysis. Other partners apart from AWS are Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Seqera is the driving force behind 🔶 Nextflow, 🔶 MultiQC (Open-source tool to aggregate bioinformatic analyses results), 🔶 Wave (Open-source container creation and distribution for data analysis), 🔶 Fusion (Distributed, lightweight file system for data pipelines in the cloud) and the 🔶 Seqera Platform (Full integrated and scalable tools for modern bioinformatics). On May 23, 2024, Seqera announced the launch of 🔶 Seqera Containers, a no-cost, streamlined bioinformatics container solution, during their second annual Nextflow SUMMIT in Boston. Seqera’s flagship product 🔶 Tower is an intuitive centralized command post for Nextflow pipelines that enables collaborative analysis of genomics data at scale. Tower is now used by over 150 leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including household names such as AstraZeneca, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Oxford Nanopore, and Invitae.
Mi Laboratories
On October 10, 2024, MiLaboratories, a leader in computational biology innovation, announced the successful close of its Series A funding round ($10M), led by Madrid-based Kfund, with additional backing from Speedinvest and other prominent international investors (MiLaboratories Secures Series A, Raising Total Funding to $10 Million to Revolutionize the World of Genomic Research).
Moreover, MiLaboratories recently launched a new software called Platforma.bio, which not only simplifies the complex analysis of immunogenomic data for researchers, but furthers the technology critical for drug discovery, especially in the field of mRNA vaccines and oncovaccines (Platforma.bio by MiLaboratories is making waves in drug discovery).
MiLaboratories (Latvia) is the leader in immunome data analysis software with the flagship product MiXCR, a top-notch solution to analyze immunology next generation sequencing data (in vaccine development, CAR-T therapies, antibody discovery and other areas) and is part of the Platforma Bio (a UI-first computational biology for biologists). Platforma Bio simplifies data analysis, converting complex tasks into user-friendly blocks for effortless biological analysis. On April 29, 2024, Miltenyi Biotec, a global pioneer in biotechnology, and MiLaboratories announced a landmark partnership combining MiLaboratories' cutting-edge RNA kit technology for immune sequencing with Miltenyi Biotec's robust production and commercialization capabilities.
Speed Invest GmbH
Apart backing MiLaboratories (Speedinvest and others back MiLaboratories’ $10M round to revolutionise genome research), Rivia, a Swiss startup specializing in AI-driven analytics and clinical trial data infrastructure, has just secured a €3M seed funding round also led by Speedinvest (Zurich-based Rivia raises €3 million to address the critical inefficiencies in the current clinical trial process). Rivia offers a real-time, integrated view of data to improve the evaluation of new treatments and trial conduct with its Integrated Clinical Trial Intelligence Platform.
Rivia's advanced data integration engine and user-friendly interface empowers data exploration across multiple trials, all in one location, all in real-time in order to:
🖇️ Leverage powerful analytics
🖇️ Reduce time to generate & analyze reports, from days to hours
🖇️ Minimize data errors and have full traceability for data integrity and compliance
🖇️ Integrate and harmonize multiple trials sources in less than 30 days with Rivia’s Trial Data Engine
🖇️ Work with data domains relevant to your studies, configuring derived terms and observations, and
🖇️ Establish visit schedules to make analyses and figures accurate.
Moreover, planqc, a Germany-headquartered digital atom-based quantum computing startup, has snapped €50M in Series A funding (Germany-based planqc snaps €50M to build scalable quantum computers). The European Family Office CATRON Holding and the DeepTech & Climate Fonds (DTCF) led the round, and additional financial support was provided by Bayern Kapital, the Max-Planck Foundation, further private investors, and existing investors UVC and Speedinvest. It also includes a non-dilutive grant from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
On October 9, 2024, former partners from Speedinvest and Target Partners launched a new fund, Backtrace, to invest in early-stage software developer, security and AI infrastructure startups (Ex-Speedinvest and Target Partners VCs make first close of new fund). The Munich-based fund has raised €10M for its first close out of a planned €30M, which it hopes to complete within the next year. Backtrace VC will invest pre-seed cheques of between €750k to €1M and seed cheques of over €1M and they plan to lead or co-lead deals, aiming to invest in 20 to 25 companies.
Speedinvest, born in Austria, is a venture capital fund based in Berlin, London, Munich, Paris and Vienna with more than €1B to invest in pre-Seed, Seed and early-stage tech startups across Europe. Their typical first check is €700K - €1.3M and they aim for double digit ownership. In pre-Seed deals, they invest up to €1M and in Seed up to €3M. They have six dedicated sector-focused investment teams, which are Deep Tech, Fintech, Health & TechBio, Climate Tech & Industrial Tech, Marketplaces & Consumer and SaaS & Infra. They also combine the expertise of investors from across their sector-focused teams to collaboratively fund next-generation Crypto and Emerging Markets startups. They invest in Europe, from Ukraine to Ireland and Estonia to Greece.