InSilico Genomics grabs $1.5M for fledgling bioinformatics biz

May 20, 2013 | By
InSilico Genomics has found seed money to become a player in the growing market for genomic research software. The company has raised €1.2 million ($1.5 million) to advance its genomics platform, attracting investments from the online payment group Ogone and Foundation Life Sciences Partners, BioInform reported.
A spinoff of the Free University of Brussels, InSilico Genomics offers academics and industry the ability to compare internal RNA sequencing data with public datasets, and the startup's platform supports a host of open-source software tools that enable researchers to slice and dice their data. As BioInform reports, the company aims to beef up the security and credentials of the system as it seeks new business from clinical researchers.
Investors have warmed up to companies in the bioinformatics business, which is expected to explode as companies seek to wrest valuable information from Big Data sources such as next-generation sequencing datasets and vast amounts of electronic patient records. In the genomics arena, the startup Bina Technologies recently announced a $6.25 million round for a software-hardware hybrid offering, and Spiral Genetics snapped up $3 million for a cloud-based bioinformatics tool.


BCC Research predicted that the bioinformatics market would skyrocket form $3.2 billion in 2012 to $7.5 billion by 2017, more than doubling over the course of 5 years. For startups like InSilico, this provides an opportunity for rapid growth in the coming years. Yet the field have been swamped with new entrants, and not every one of them will likely survive.