Welcome!

Big Data Journal Authors: Stephen Pierzchala, Elizabeth White, Patrick Burke, Pat Romanski, Sebastian Kruk

News Feed Item

Spiral Genetics Closes $3 Million in Funding Led by DFJ and Announces Partnership with Omicia

-Spiral will continue the development of the fastest bioinformatics analysis tool available-

SEATTLE, March 12, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Spiral Genetics, a cloud-based big data bioinformatics company, announced today that it closed its Series A financing, led by venture capital firm DFJ.  The new capital will help further Spiral Genetics' mission to create revolutionary tools that empower the bioinformatics community to solve the large-scale genomic data challenges of tomorrow. The company intends to use the funds to expand its bioinformatics engineering team, scale its sales and marketing efforts and accelerate product development.

In addition to its funding, Spiral announced its partnership with Omicia, a developer of scalable and fully integrated informatics systems specifically designed to interpret human genome sequences for research and clinical applications.  The partnership leverages Omicia's Opal solution which is a variant analysis tool that empowers researchers and clinicians to analyze genomes and prioritize disease-causing variants.   

"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," stated Martin G. Reese, Ph.D, Co-Founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer Omicia. The Opal tool is used by CLIA labs and clinical researchers and in combination with Spiral's platform is providing same-day analysis from raw reads to produce clinically relevant findings.

"Innovations in DNA sequencing have led to an explosion of data, which presents an enormous market opportunity," said Rachel Pike of DFJ. "These developments are only accelerating and will have real and lasting implications on drug development, R&D in agriculture, and biological production of chemicals and fuels. Spiral Genetics is a solution that will both manage and draw insight from these data, enabling the industry to keep up with constantly-accelerating technological progress."

The Spiral Platform offers the fastest cloud-based bioinformatics analysis available today.  Their breakthrough approach accelerates the data processing time from days to hours, shrinking analysis time for a whole human genome at 40x coverage to 3 hours. 

"We are thrilled to be backed by DFJ," stated Adina Mangubat, CEO of Spiral Genetics.  "DFJ has consistently invested in industry leaders whose technologies are changing critical industry sectors.  As more academic researchers and agro-genomic and pharmaceutical companies increase their use of genomic data, there's no doubt that a large-scale, focused bioinformatics toolkit to process and analyze genomic data will be vital. We are excited to be at the forefront of developing new solutions to these challenges."

About Spiral Genetics
Spiral Genetics provides the fastest cloud-based bioinformatics analysis available today. Used by customers across a variety of industries including drug development and agriculture, Spiral's breakthrough approach accelerates data processing time from days to hours, allowing researchers to analyze a whole human genome from raw DNA sequence data to a fully annotated list of genetic variants in just 3 hours.

About DFJ
DFJ is a venture capital firm that partners with extraordinary entrepreneurs who set out to change the world. Since 1985, DFJ and the DFJ Global Network have had $7B committed to their funds and have managed more than 400 portfolio investments, including AdMob, Baidu, Box, Skype, Hotmail, SpaceX, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, Twitter, Tumblr and Yammer. DFJ works with companies at seed, early and growth stages, with the goal of creating iconic and lasting businesses. DFJ pioneers investing in emerging markets including consumer and enterprise information technology, digital media, and disruptive technologies. The DFJ Global Network is a federation of 16 independent venture funds operating on four continents that cooperate on investment diligence and co-investing. Learn more at dfj.com.

About Omicia, Inc.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Omicia develops scalable and fully integrated informatics systems specifically designed to interpret human genome sequences for research and clinical applications. Omicia's mission is to help research scientists, clinicians and patients better understand the most relevant information from personal genome sequences and their potential medical consequences. Omicia is funded with private investments and a series of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the National Institutes of Health. For more information, please visit www.omicia.com

SOURCE Spiral Genetics

More Stories By PR Newswire

Copyright © 2007 PR Newswire. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of PRNewswire content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of PRNewswire. PRNewswire shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.

Cloud Expo Breaking News
"Since Cloud Expo is running the week of June 10, we thought it'd be a great idea to schedule our Meetup this week. That way, if you have colleagues, friends, or family in town that week for the Expo, you can invite them to join you!" With those words, the OpenStack New York Meetup Group's organizer's launched a landing page this week where anyone interested can register for the June 12 evening event.
“Cloud has everything to do with what has happened with Big Data,” explained Jason Deck, Director of Strategic Alliances at Logicworks, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Big Data doesn’t exist in its easily accessible way without cloud. From reduced startup costs, to cheap storage, to fast processing, to adequate security, to the easy incorporation of third-party analytics tools, cloud made Big Data accessible to customers of all sizes, with all different bud...
“Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as...
SYS-CON Events announced today that OpenStack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. OpenStack software controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, all managed by a dashboard that gives administrators control while empowering their users to provision resources through a web interface. OpenStack powers some of the most widely-used SaaS app...
SYS-CON Events announced today that BUMI (Backup My Info!), the premium provider of managed online backup and recovery solutions for small to mid-sized businesses, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Manhattan-based BUMI (Backup My Info!) is a premium managed service provider specializing in online data backup and recovery. Founded in 2002, the company's data backup and recovery serv...
SYS-CON Events announced today that nfina Technologies, a provider of highly reliable cloud server products, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. nfina Technologies develops, manufactures, and markets highly reliable cloud server products, designed to solve the most demanding data center requirements in mission-critical cloud applications. Nfina’s staff has decades of experience in co...
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dave Eichorn, Global Data Center Practice Head at Zensar, will share a case study describing how a utility services company handled the migration of its Microsoft platform to the cloud. Challenged with the time-consuming task of opening operations out of temporary offices, this company struggled with the need to simultaneously access data that was accumulated from a vast amount of data-intensive jobs. Zensar migrated the company’s application ...
“Social, mobile, analytics and cloud can’t be looked at as distinct technology trends; they are facets of the same movement and an everyday reality for consumers and businesses alike,” said Craig Sowell, IBM VP of SmartCloud Marketing, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This means that businesses need to start looking at trends as one: cloud is the delivery, analytics is the unique insight, social is a shareable service, and mobile is the ubiquitous access.” ...
Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organiza...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Wowrack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. Wowrack’s core expertise lies in high-availability Private and Public Cloud IaaS Hosting Solutions. Wowrack provides a true Hybrid service – where business release all IT management and hardware provisioning – taking the data center and server system administrative headaches off our customer’s shoulders. ...