NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Bioinformatics firm Era7 said today that it is seeking private investors willing to participate in a €600,000 (around $660,000) investment round that the company has launched.
So far, Spanish venture capital firm CRB Inverbio has invested an undisclosed amount in the company as part of the round, Era7 said. The company is seeking to secure additional investors through a fundraising campaign it has launched on Capital Cell, a European equity crowdfunding platform for biotechnology projects. According to the site, the company currently has secured 18 investors and has raised around €327,000 (about $369,000), about 55 percent of the total amount it hopes to raise.
"With this mixed approach we get the best of both worlds," Era7 CEO Eduardo Pareja said in a statement. "CRB Inverbio contributes experience and knowledge in the sector … and the crowdfunding opens [up] the possibility [of] invest[ing] to other types of investors."
Era7 plans to use the funds to support business development efforts by its US subsidiary and to further integrate and automate its tools for analyzing microbiomes and bacterial genomes, the company said.
Earlier this year, Era7 received a $430,000 grant from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness to extend its platform for analyzing 16S metagenomics data to support clinical use of microbiome data. The funds are part of a larger roughly $1 million grant awarded to the CardioBiome consortium, a group of four companies working on a platform for studying patients' microbiomes.