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DNAnexus Closes $58M Venture Capital Round

CHICAGO (GenomeWeb) – DNAnexus, maker of a cloud-based genome informatics and data management platform, has closed a $58 million round of venture capital.

New investor Foresite Capital led the round, while Microsoft made a "strategic investment," Mountain View, California-based DNAnexus said today. Previous investors GV — formerly Google Ventures — TPG Biotech, WuXi NextCode, Claremont Creek Ventures, and MidCap Financial also took part in the financing.

This is the first major fundraise for DNAnexus since April 2015, when WuXi NextCode's parent, WuXi PharmaTech, invested $15 million in the company. The new cash infusion, a Series E round, brings total venture capital invested in DNAnexus to $140 million since 2009, a company spokesman said.

DNAnexus said the money will help the firm expand its presence in clinical trials and to roll out its technology, including the Mosaic microbiome research platform and the CloudSeq set of informatics tools to support Illumina NovaSeq next-gen sequencing systems.

"The financing enables further development and the launch of our translational medicine solutions, as well as expanding our footprint in cloud-based management of genomic data in clinical trials," DNAnexus CEO Richard Daly said in a statement. "The next wave of biomedical insights is coming from cross-institutional collaborations that produce rapidly increasing amounts of multi-omics data."

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