NEW YORK – 3billion, a Korean startup offering genomic rare disease screening, said Friday that it has closed a $13 million Series C funding round.
The round was led by Wells Investment, JW Asset, Magna Investment, Yuanta Investment, Aventures Investment, Korea Investment & Securities, and Kakao Investment.
Seoul-based 3billon, a spinoff from Korean genomic services provider Macrogen, has now raised $30 million since its seed round in 2017. A Series B round in 2019 brought in $10 million.
The firm said that it has plans to go public in early 2022 on the KOSDAQ exchange in South Korea.
3billion offers rare disease diagnostic services based on whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing in 32 countries. The firm processed 8,000 tests in 2020, up fourfold from the previous year, and expects to handle 20,000 cases this year.
The firm also has developed artificial intelligence-based technology for variant interpretation. Citing a preprint article on BioRxiv, 3billion claims that 3Cnet, its deep learning-based variant interpretation algorithm, is 14 percent more accurate at predicting pathogenicity of missense mutations and twice as accurate in identifying causal variants than previous methods.