NEW YORK – SeqOne Genomics said Monday that it has closed a Series A funding round worth €20 million ($22.6 million).
Omnes and Merieux Equity Partners led the round, with participation from new investor the Software Club and existing investors Elaia and IRDI Capital Investissement. SeqOne raised a €3 million seed round that closed in March 2019, bringing its total venture capital to €23 million.
The Montpellier, France-based bioinformatics firm said that it will use the new funding to expand international sales and develop new collaborative tools for genomic analysis, with an eye toward improving patient outcomes in cancer and hereditary diseases.
"The funding will give us the resources we need to enhance and commercialize our solution to make genomic analysis more accessible and affordable so that each patient can benefit from personalized medicine recommendations," cofounder and CEO Nicolas Philippe said in a statement.
Fabien Collangettes, director at Omnes, said in a statement that the investment firm was drawn to SeqOne by the startup's software.
"With the rapid expansion in … available genomic-linked treatments, the complexity of treatment interactions, and the staggering volume of biological and medical data to be factored into each medical decision, biologists and doctors must have access to reliable and actionable analyses in real time," Collangettes said. "We were particularly impressed by SeqOne's innovative technological approach that enables improved accuracy of genomic test[s] while reducing turnaround time and cost, thus delivering a key competitive advantage in this fast-growing market."
A 2017 spinout from Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Montpellier, SeqOne has aimed from the start to adapt bioinformatics to the new reality of genomics in which volumes are growing and analyses are becoming more complex. The firm notably pivoted at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate testing for SARS-CoV-2 with the help of its next-generation sequencing data-analysis software.