Seqera Labs, a startup providing data orchestration and workflow software for life sciences has raised €22 million. The Barcelona and Toronto-based company follows a strong period of growth and will help expand its product portfolio.
Founded in 2018, Seqera Labs is on a mission to accelerate scientific discovery and therapeutic breakthroughs through foundational open science software. The startup is helping the biotech sector operate in a more streamlined, efficient manner which in turn enables researchers to have more time and resources to dedicate to scientific breakthroughs.
The tech innovators have now raised €22 million in Series A funding, building on its €4.4 million raise last year, plus several grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan.
Evan Floden, Co-Founder and CEO at Seqera Labs: “Partnering with Addition, alongside our existing investors, Speedinvest and Talis Capital, as well as Boxone and Amino, demonstrates their belief in our direction and our ability to execute. Our ambition is to develop a portfolio of innovative products that positively impact millions of patients worldwide by optimizing drug research and discovery costs. We are delighted to be able to count on their support in achieving this goal.”
Addition led the funding this time round, with follow-on funding contributed by Talis Capital, Speedinvest, BoxOne Ventures and Amino Collective. It comes after a period of strong growth, with a 400% year-over-year revenue increase and a tripling of employees over the last 12 months. Seqera Labs was also pivotal to the Covid-19 variant detection with its technology used to discover and track Alpha, Delta and Omicron variants of the virus.
Jason Schneider, of Addition: “The biotechnology industry is undergoing a transformational shift and organizations must rapidly expand their capacity to process complex data at scale. Seqera Labs’ products make this easier than ever before and allow research teams to remain focused on their critical work. We’re proud to support Evan and his talented team as they continue on their impressive growth trajectory and lead breakthrough innovations in healthcare and life sciences.”
Seqera Labs began life in Barcelona in 2018 as a spin-off from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), following the initial success of Nextflow. Nextflow was created in 2013 and the popular open-source workflow and data orchestration software has become an industry standard among cloud providers, sequencing companies and genomics platforms. Today, Nextflow is used by thousands of organizations worldwide, is downloaded more than 55,000 times monthly, and is among the most successful open-source software projects in life sciences.
Tower is the company’s flagship data analysis platform and has seen wide adoption across the industry, being used by over 150 leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including AstraZeneca, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Oxford Nanopore to date.
Seqera Labs is dedicated to empowering scientists to assemble and deploy massively scalable data analysis pipelines in multi-cloud environments with minimal friction. With this latest investment, Seqera aims to move beyond scientific workflows to encompass tool development, data management, reporting, infrastructure deployment, and interactive computing.
Kirill Tasilov, General Partner at Talis Capital: “Seqera is rapidly becoming a de facto standard for complex data processing in life sciences and biology. We are beyond excited to continue supporting them on their journey of bringing the entire industry into the modern age.”
