Bina Technologies has found financing to advance a recently launched platform for genomic data analysis. The Redwood City, CA-based startup reports that Sierra Ventures has led a $6.25 million round of Series B money, with more backers expected to step up with capital to fatten the deal in the coming months.
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| Bina founder and CEO Narges Bani Asadi |
Launched in 2011, Bina has been developing a hybrid software and hardware offering for research and clinical operations inundated with massive amounts of DNA sequencing data. In February the company, founded by Stanford and Berkeley whizzes, released its analysis platform, promising to whittle down the time required to analyze raw data from next-generation sequencers from days to less than 4 hours.
The company has already won business from researchers at Stanford--where Bina founder and CEO Narges Bani Asadi was a student--and users from the Veterans Administration hospital in Palo Alto, CA. Along with the latest financing news, Bina announced a partnership with Dr. Elizabeth Worthey at the Medical College of Wisconsin to aid analysis of sequenced newborn genomes in an effort to quickly catch genetic diseases during the first month of life.
With funding from Sierra Ventures, Bina plans to beef up marketing and development of its technology in genomics analysis, a field that has become increasingly crowded with startups angling for a piece of the growing clinical market.
"We believe the intersection of genomic analysis and big data is creating disruptive new technologies for mining valuable medical information in the enormous streams of genomic data being generated today," Bani Asadi said in a March 26 statement about the venture round. "Analyzing this kind of large-scale data has been too expensive or too technically difficult for researchers and clinicians until now."
- here's the release
Special Report: Bina Technologies - 5 next-gen software tools for biopharma R&D