NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Lifebit, a London-based maker of advanced genomic analysis technology, has raised $3 million in seed funding and introduced its first product. Pentech and Connect Ventures led the investment, with participation from Beacon Capital and crowdsourcing angel investment site Tiny VC.
The product, called Deploit, is a cloud-based genomic analysis platform featuring artificial intelligence technology. Lifebit called Deploit the first step toward its goal to create a "cognitive system that can reason about DNA data in the same way as humans," making such analysis technology accessible to people without informatics training.
Several unspecified pharmaceutical and biotech companies are testing Deploit, Lifebit said.
"The problem these organizations face is no longer sequencing vast quantities of genomic data, but rather making sense of this data quickly and affordably," Lifebit CEO and Cofounder Maria Chatzou said in statement. "This requires new data analysis technologies, which is where Lifebit comes in. Our mission as a company is to enable cloud-based real-time genomic analysis at scale, anywhere, by anyone."
Chatzou and Chief Technology Officer Pablo Prieto Barja started Lifebit a year ago in Cambridge, UK, after having studied for PhDs together at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona. The pair were part of the team that created Nextflow, a widely used open-source platform to automate DNA analysis.