NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Bioinformatics services and consulting company Eagle Genomics plans to raise £1 million ($1.6 million) in new financing to support commercialization of its new cloud-based life sciences data analysis product and expansion of its staff.
Eagle Genomics CEO David Flanders told GenomeWeb Daily News today that the four-and a-half year-old firm, based at the Babraham Research Campus in Cambridge, UK, is looking to raise the equity from venture capital and angel investors.
Eagle plans to use the cash to fuel development and commercialization of its ElasticAP product, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscription platform aimed at customers seeking to analyze large volumes of next-generation sequencing data, and to add new staff to its team.
"The equity would be used not only to drive the productization of ElasticAP and its marketing, but also to hire more bioinformaticians so that we can then increase our offerings to existing and new customers," Flanders said.
The move marks a shift for the company, which seeks to make the ElasticAP its main focus and its existing consulting and services business a secondary focus, although it would use some of the new funding to expand that existing business as well.
The ElasticAP, a web-based platform developed jointly by Eagle and Cycle Computing, is used to manage life sciences data in the cloud, to support in-house and external collaborations, and for use with applications such as the Ensembl genome browser and Galaxy pipeline management tools. Customers are able to access data hosted on the cloud and manage and analyze it without Eagle's intervention, but using the company's IP.
Flanders told GWDN that ElasticAP has the potential to serve the needs of new customers seeking bioinformatics from beyond the traditional sectors of pharmaceutical and biotechnology research to those involved in crop science, animal health, and biofuels, and other sectors requiring large-scale data analysis.
Eagle believes that in two years one-third of its revenue will come from ElasticAP subscriptions.
Flanders said he expects the company, which has been developing the product by reinvesting its revenues, will only require one round of funding.