NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Plant bioinformatics startup Computomics of Tübingen, Germany, has raised €500,000 ($544,000) in seed financing from venture capital investor High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF).
Computomics, a spinoff from the University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Developmental Biology, was founded in 2012 by Detlef Weigel, a plant researcher at MPI, and several colleagues from the University of Tübingen and ETH Zurich.
The company offers bioinformatics analysis services for next-generation sequencing data to agricultural biotechnology and plant breeding companies, including genome assembly and annotation, genomic variation, transcriptomics, epigenetics, metagenomics, genomic selection, and phenotyping analyses.
Computomics plans to use the funding to expand internationally. According to HTGF, the company currently has 10 employees.
HTGF is a public-private partnership that provides seed financing to high-tech startups and has about €576 million under management in two funds. Investors include the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy; KfW, a government-owned development bank; and a number of corporations, such as BASF, Bayer, Qiagen, and Carl Zeiss.