Data orchestration startup Seqera raises $5.5 million in seed funding
This release was first covered in a TechCrunch article on September 7th 2021.
BARCELONA, Sept. 7, 2021 — Today, Seqera – the leading provider of data orchestration and workflow software for life sciences – announces it has raised $5.5 million USD in seed funding. The round was co-led by European VCs Talis Capital and Speedinvest, with participation from existing investor BoxOne Ventures. The funding also includes a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan, which supports essential open source software in science. The company will use the funding to further develop its technology, as well as to grow its North American presence.
Seqera span out from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and was founded in 2018 by the creators of Nextflow, the popular open-source workflow and data orchestration software. Seqera continues to build on the Nextflow platform to solve some of the most challenging issues that the life sciences sector faces by allowing organisations to scale their analysis across disparate infrastructure. The core technology enables and simplifies complex deployments of data analysis pipelines in multi-cloud environments, monitors and optimises drug research and discovery costs, accelerating clinical diagnostics and enabling data-driven life sciences solutions.
Seqera is dedicated to empowering scientists to assemble and deploy massively scalable data analysis pipelines in multi-cloud environments with minimal friction. Nextflow has become a key driver for effectively doubling the productivity of scientists and engineers by allowing them to focus on science. The software deployment model ensures that data never leaves an organisations’ infrastructure boundary and enables computation to be moved to the data.
Within its customer base, Seqera includes five of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. With life sciences data volumes and the related analysis in pharmaceuticals, biotech and life sciences increasing exponentially, Seqera is seeing strong, record demand for both its commercial and its open source offerings. The Nextflow runtime has been downloaded over 2 million times and the commercial cloud offering recently processed its five billionth tasks.
The software gained further momentum in 2020 during the pandemic as it was applied to global SARS-CoV-2 sequencing efforts. Sequencing centres and experts collaborated to develop pipelines for the analysis of COVID-19 samples using Nextflow’s platform which led to the identification and on-going surveillance of the variants including Alpha and Delta. Seqera is also enabling advances in the personalised medicine space, in particular, personalised oncology, a segment anticipated to see huge growth in the coming years. Gritstone bio is one such Seqera customer using Nextflow across research and production areas for machine learning workloads in their personalised oncology applications.
While the company is currently focusing on the life sciences segment, the software can be utilised by enterprises across all computational-intense, data pipeline applications, including machine learning and AI, manufacturing, and financial services.
Evan Floden, CEO and co-founder at Seqera, said:
“The last decade has seen an intensified demand for tools that can manage and process complex data. From personalized immunogenic vaccines to new diagnostics, our customers are performing work paramount to our global health. Joining forces with Speedinvest and Talis Capital provides us with an unparalleled opportunity to grow our reach and serve these customers better. This partnership is centered on a shared belief in a future transformed by data science research, applications and products. We welcome them into the Nextflow community and are excited at the prospect of building a better world together.”
Paolo Di Tommaso, CTO and co-founder at Seqera, said:
“We could not be more excited about the road ahead for the Nextflow project. In the past years we have pioneered the use of software containers for high-throughput data processing pipelines and delivered the state-of-art workflow engine adopted by a rapidly expanding user base. This backing enables the project to tackle new, bigger challenges. We are working to bring all our users innovative solutions while maintaining a strong link to the project’s core values of openness, agility, scalability and interoperability.”
Kirill Tasilov, principal at Talis Capital, said:
“Advancements in machine learning, and the proliferation of volumes and types of data, are leading to increasingly more applications of computer science in life sciences and biology. While this is incredibly exciting from a humanity perspective, it’s also skyrocketing the cost of experiments to sometimes millions of dollars per project as they become computer-heavy and complex to run. Nextflow is already a ubiquitous solution in this space and Seqera is driving those capabilities at an enterprise level – and in doing so, is bringing the entire life sciences industry into the modern age. We’re thrilled to be a part of Seqera’s journey.”
Arnaud Bakker, principal at Speedinvest, said:
“With the explosion of biological data from cheap, commercial DNA sequencing, there is a pressing need to analyse increasingly growing and complex quantities of data. Seqera’s open and cloud-first framework provides an advanced tooling kit allowing organisations to scale complex deployments of data analysis and enable data-driven life sciences solutions. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with the team and support them in accelerating innovation in the healthcare industry.”
Press contact: Ellie Crocker, Talis Capital: ellie@taliscapital.com; +44 779 946 3008
About Seqera
Seqera is the leading provider of workflow orchestration software required for data pipeline processing, multi-cloud infrastructure provisioning, and secure collaboration. The core open-source technology Nextflow has transformed the building of massively scalable and distributed computing solutions. The software enables developers and data scientists to create and securely deploy data applications in the cloud and/or on traditional on-premise infrastructure. The company’s products are widely used by leaders in the life sciences segment and are now being adopted by enterprises across all computational-intense, data pipeline applications, including for machine learning and AI, manufacturing, and financial services. Learn more at www.seqera.io.
About Talis Capital
Founded in 2009, Talis is a London-based venture capital firm, backing visionary founders from seed to Series B in the US and Europe. Investing on behalf of an interdisciplinary community of entrepreneurs who’ve built billion-dollar businesses, Talis is uniquely placed to add value to the whole entrepreneurial journey, supporting founders who see the future differently through every stage of their company lifecycles. Darktrace (LSE), Onfido, Ynsect, Garten, Luminance, iwoca, Plum Guide and Pirate.com are among Talis’ portfolio of 55+ companies. For more information, see taliscapital.com.
About Speedinvest
Speedinvest is a leading early-stage venture capital firm with €450M AuM and 40 investors based in Berlin, London, Munich, Paris, Vienna and San Francisco. Our dedicated sector focused teams are the first to fund Europe’s most innovative technology startups and our in-house operational experts are on-hand to offer founders ongoing support with growth, HR, US market expansion, and more. Wefox, Bitpanda, TIER Mobility, GoStudent, Curve, CoachHub, Schüttflix, TourRadar, Adverity, and Twaice are among our portfolio of 200+ companies. Learn more at speedinvest.com.
About the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was founded in 2015 to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges — from eradicating disease and improving education, to addressing the needs of our local communities. Our mission is to build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future for everyone. For more information, please visit chanzuckerberg.com.