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

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