NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Bioinformatics firm Spiral Genetics today announced the completion of its Series A financing that raised $3 million. It also announced a partnership with Omicia.
Venture capital firm DFJ led the round and funds will go toward the development of bioinformatics tools for the analyses of large-scale genomic data. Spiral will use the money to expand its bioinformatics engineering team, scale its sales and marketing efforts, and accelerate product development, it said.
The company's cloud-based platform accelerates the data processing time from days to hours, it added, resulting in the analysis time for a whole genome at 40x coverage at about three hours.
The Seattle-based firm also announced a partnership with Omicia, which develops informatics systems for interpreting human genome sequences for research and clinical applications. The deal will leverage Omicia's Opal solution, a variant analysis tool for genome research and prioritizing disease-causing variants.
Martin Reese, co-founder, president, and CEO of Emeryville, Calif.-based Omicia, said in a statement, "Our partnership with Spiral Genetics allows faster and more accurate interpretation of human genomes for clinical relevance, a critical bottleneck for adoption of genomes into clinical care and laboratory testing.
"In combination with Omicia's Opal system, our partnership will move us closer to a seamless solution from raw sequence data to clinically relevant genomic variants. Speed and user friendliness are critical for adoption of human genome sequencing," he added.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.