NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Spanish bioinformatics firm Era7 announced this week that it has closed a €600,000 ($625,000) crowdfunded investment round.
Era7 said the funding will be used to support business development efforts by its US subsidiary based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and to further integrate and automate the firm’s tools for analyzing microbiomes and bacterial genomes.
"This expansion plan will ... allow us to get more customers for our new services of microbiome analysis, bacterial genomics, and immunogenomics," Era7 CEO Eduardo Pareja said in a statement.
A total of 50 investors participated in the round and will receive a 20 percent stake in Era7, giving the company a €2.4 million pre-money valuation.
The crowdfunding round, which was led by CRB Inverbio and was launched in August, follows Era7's receipt in early 2016 of a $430,000 grant from the the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness to extend its platform for analyzing 16S metagenomics data to support clinical use of microbiome data.