This story was originally published Oct. 17.
DNAnexus has raised $15 million in second-round funding led by Google Ventures and TPG Biotech, the next-gen sequencing data management and analysis firm said last week. In collaboration with Google, it is also now hosting a version of the National Center for Biotechnology Information's Sequence Read Archive, which recently lost its government funding.
The company plans to use the new financing to increase its staff and accelerate its product development. Besides Google and TPG, First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, K9 Ventures, and Felicis Ventures participated in the financing round.
DNAnexus is collaborating with Google Cloud Storage to host and provide free access to its mirror of the SRA. Earlier this year, NCBI said it would phase out its support for the database due to federal funding cuts. DNAnexus has developed a new web interface for SRA that allows users to search and access the datasets. The data currently do not include the analysis data and the Trace Archive repository, according to the firm.
The SRA, founded in 2007 as the Short Read Archive, contains more than 100 terabases of sequence reads from a large number of next-generation sequencing datasets, for example from the 1000 Genomes Project, and several funding agencies and open-access journals require data submission to the SRA.
In addition to housing SRA data, DNAnexus allows researchers to import SRA datasets into its commercial platform, which allows functions like mapping, RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, variant analyses, and data visualization. It has also recently reduced its standard academic pricing by half.
Founded in 2010 as a spinout from Stanford University, DNAnexus offers web-based data management and analysis services for next-generation sequencing data (IS 4/20/2010).