NEW YORK – Life sciences workflow software startup Seqera Labs said Tuesday that it has raised $5.5 million in seed funding. Talis Capital and Speedinvest led the round, with participation from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and BoxOne Ventures.
Barcelona, Spain-based Seqera, a spinout of the Centre for Genomic Regulation, develops workflow management software for data pipeline processing, working in multi-cloud environments and facilitating collaboration. Founded in 2018 by the creators of the Nextflow open-source programming framework for DNA analysis, Seqera is built on the Nextflow infrastructure.
Seqera said that its platform supported the collaboration that led to the identification of the Alpha and Delta variants of SARS-CoV-2. The technology currently processes all COVID-19 sequencing data from the UK.
The company claims six of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies as customers.
"From personalized immunogenic vaccines to new diagnostics, our customers are performing work paramount to our global health," Seqera Labs CEO and cofounder Evan Floden said in a statement. "Joining forces with Speedinvest and Talis Capital provides us with an unparalleled opportunity to grow our reach and serve these customers better."
Arnaud Bakker, principal at Speedinvest, said that the proliferation of DNA sequencing data has necessitated technology such as Nextflow and Seqera. "Seqera's open and cloud-first framework provides an advanced tooling kit allowing organizations to scale complex deployments of data analysis and enable data-driven life sciences solutions," Bakker said.