Microsoft and Foresite Capital Contribute to DNANexus's $58M Funding Round

Foresite Capital and Microsoft have joined a growing list of investors behind DNAnexus, Inc., a cloud-based genomic data analysis company. DNANexus announced today that it had raised $58 million in a recently-closed Series E funding round.

Existing investors, including GV (the fund formerly known as Google Ventures), TPG Biotech, and WuXi NextCODE also participated.

Foresite led the investment round. Its founder and CEO Jim Tananbaum called DNANexus “a true pioneer and trusted brand in cloud-based platforms for research and precision medicine.”

The company works with genomics on multiple fronts: Its core technology revolves around providing storage, access, and analysis for large swaths of genomic data. In the spring of 2017, it announced collaborations with AstraZeneca and Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine, and over the summer it announced the MOSAIC Microbiome Platform to study microbiome data.

“The next wave of biomedical insights is coming from cross-institutional collaborations that produce rapidly increasing amounts of multi-omics data,” DNANexus CEO Richard Daly said in a statement. He indicated that the investment would enable continued development and eventual launch of his company’s translational medical solutions, as well as their ongoing efforts to assist multicenter clinical trials.

“We are proud of our work dedicated to improving how global research and development organizations leverage large biomedical datasets to develop and deliver precision medicine solutions,” Daly said.

The funding round was the company’s first since it closed a $15 million Series D round nearly 3 years ago. GV joined the fold during Series B in 2011 and also invested in the company in 2014. In all, the Mountain View, California-based firm has raised over $100 million since its founding in 2009.

Last month, Google Brain released a pilot version of its DeepVariant machine learning technology on the DNANexus platform.