Omicia Closes $23 Million Series B

By Bio-IT World Staff

June 8, 2016 | Omicia today announced the completion of a $23 million Series B financing round. Several new investors participated in the round, including UPMC Enterprises, Roche Venture Fund, LDV Partners, Ping An Ventures, and a large genomics investor, as well as existing investors ARTIS Ventures, Acadia Woods Partners and Buchanan Investments.

Omicia’s latest financing will be used to fuel acceleration in product development and an expansion in sales, sales support, marketing, and operations, the company said in the funding announcement. In addition, the company plans to extend variations of its flagship Opal Clinical platform for use in new geographies and new verticals including life science research, clinical trial support, population health management and consumer applications.

“As evidenced by the work we’re doing with Genomics England, the world’s leading national genome project, Omicia is filling a critical gap between sequencing tools and clinical decision making, delivering on the promise of precision medicine,” said Matt Tindall, CEO of Omicia, in the announcement.

One year ago, Omicia was named one of four finalists to begin working on the first patients from Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project. In September, Genomics England announced that it was contracting with Omicia and Congenica on the interpretation of the genomes from the first 8,000 patients. The counter on the Genomics England website records 9,800 sequenced genomes so far. Omicia is focusing on interpretation for rare disease genomics.

“As an investor, UPMC is excited to work with Omicia to begin to address today’s extraordinary opportunities in precision medicine,” said Tal Heppenstall, president of UPMC Enterprises, the innovation and commercialization arm of UPMC, one of the country’s largest integrated healthcare provider and payor systems. “We envision a future in which we can routinely deliver actionable genomic insights about individual patients in real-time, within the workflow of our 3,500 physicians.”

In addition, Omicia’s Opal Clinical platform leverages a deep variant data warehouse to deliver high-throughput results to assist lab partners with automated diagnostic reporting. The easily deployed, white-label solution can be used to replace manual, expensive and difficult to maintain in-house software pipelines to lower costs and improve quality.

“Omicia has built a world-class software platform that can be applied at the intersection of genomic data and more traditional healthcare information to generate insights powering both predictive and preventive medicine,” said Stu Peterson, co-founder and senior partner at ARTIS Ventures, who in addition to contributing to its latest round of financing was its first institutional investor, leading Omicia’s Series A. “Genome sequencing, combined with machine-learning algorithms and powerful data analytics, will provide physicians with more complete, actionable insights at a reasonable cost.”

Another significant new development for the company is the strong support in the round from strategically important overseas investors. With new partners in Asia and Europe, the company intends to continue its push into these important markets.

“We are very proud to work with Omicia and its team to bring novel technology offerings to markets which are driven by active health management initiatives,” said Jiang Zhang, Managing Director Ping An Ventures. “Omicia’s software is designed perfectly to address important population health management opportunities in Asia.”