NEW YORK – DNAnexus said Tuesday that it has completed a $100 million financing round, led by Perceptive Advisors and Northpond Ventures. Previous investors GV, Foresite Capital, TPG Capital, and First Round Capital participated, as did new backer Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.
The Mountain View, California-based bioinformatics company said that it would use the funding to continue global expansion and rapidly scale up its processing capabilities. The DNAnexus platform has seen usage grow by 70 percent in each of the last four years, and customers now use 10 million core processing hours monthly and collectively store 28 petabytes of omics data and related analysis, according to the company.
"This financing drives advancement of our data science technologies benefiting our rapidly growing customer base,'' said CEO Richard Daly said in a statement.
"The next wave of biomedical insights and treatments will be driven by large-scale clinical, multiomics, and real-world data resulting from cross-institutional collaborations," Daly added. "The trend toward cloud-based data analysis and collaboration is accelerating, and we are at the right place at the right time to future-proof and serve our customers."
He said that the virtual nature of the DNAnexus platform has allowed customers to grow during the COVID-19 pandemic.
DNAnexus has been leading the development of the PrecisionFDA cloud-based next-generation sequencing platform for the US Food and Drug Administration since 2015.
The company teamed with consulting firm Deloitte to win a five-year, $20 million contract late last year to run the collaborative omics environment for PrecisionFDA.
In 2019, DNAnexus closed a $68 million Series F funding round that it said would support efforts to deploy DNAnexus Apollo, a cloud-based platform for multiomics and clinical data science exploration, analysis, and discovery. According to the company, that product is intended to help pharmaceutical research and development teams quickly test hypotheses and learn more about mechanisms of action, biomarkers, and targets.