NEW YORK – German bioinformatics startup Lucid Genomics said Monday that it has raised €1.3 million ($1.4 million) in pre-seed financing.
Caesar Ventures led the round, joined by BIF Partners, Another.vc, and the MPF Accelerator.
"This is a perfect example of how basic research results from the Max Planck Society can lead to truly innovative products in the market," Bram Wijlands, managing director of Max Planck Innovation, the society's technology transfer arm, said in a statement, adding that Lucid was the first to take part in an incubation program to raise venture capital.
In a statement, the firm said it would use the funding to expand its software-as-a-service platform for extracting genomic information to improve diagnostics and drug discovery. Its initial focus will be on rare genetic diseases, followed by cancer diagnostics "and other related sectors."
Berlin-based Lucid is a spinout of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics and the Institute of Medical Genetics and Human Genetics at Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin. It holds an exclusive license from the Max Planck Society and Charité to commercialize machine learning-based methods that improve genetic variant detection by incorporating data from both coding and noncoding regions of the genome.