NEW YORK – Helix said on Thursday that it has closed a $50 million Series C financing round led by existing investors Warburg Pincus, DFJ Growth, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, Mayo Clinic, and Temasek.
The San Mateo, California-based company said it plans to use the new funding, which follows a $200 million Series B round in 2018, to accelerate the use of its population genomics platform across health systems, life science companies, and payors, as well as to support its COVID-19 testing and viral surveillance efforts.
The company uses its Exome+ assay to sequence about 20,000 protein-coding genes and 300,000 non-coding regions. In January, the Helix Laboratory Platform was the first to receive FDA authorization for a whole-exome sequencing platform.
"Helix has a proven and tested platform for generating high-quality genomic data, securing it, and making it portable so that it can provide a lifetime of insights to health systems, life sciences companies, and payers," said Amr Kronfol, managing director at Warburg Pincus, in a statement.
"[T]he novel FDA pathway we created for our Helix Laboratory Platform means that Helix and our partners will be able to develop and obtain market authorization for future tests using subsets of sequencing data generated from the platform, including for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and carrier screening," added James Lu, CEO and cofounder of Helix.