Seattle-area health data company Truveta announced $320 million in fresh funding and an ambitious new initiative to create a giant genomic dataset.
The new investment — which comes from 17 health systems, Illumina, and Regeneron — pushes Truveta’s valuation above $1 billion, making it the latest unicorn to emerge from the Seattle region.
Founded in 2020, Truveta aims to aggregate medical records data from 30 partner institutions to link treatments with outcomes and underlying health.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based company describes its new Truveta Genome Project as the “largest and most diverse database of genotypic and phenotypic information ever assembled” that is more than ten times the scale of previous endeavors including NIH’s All of Us and the UK Biobank, according to the startup.
Truveta will work with its health system partners to gather leftover biospecimens from routine lab tests that are linked to de-identified medical records for anonymized genetic research. Regeneron, a publicly traded biotech giant, will sequence the exomes of the first ten million volunteers.
“The scale and diversity of the Truveta Genome Project will enable us to explore the complex interplay between genetics and health in unprecedented detail,” Aris Baras, senior vice president at Regeneron, said in a statement.
Other health systems participating in the project include Advocate Health, CommonSpirit Health, Henry Ford Health, Northwell Health, Providence, and Trinity Health.
Regeneron invested $119.5 million in the latest round, while Illumina, another publicly traded company that specializes in genetic sequencing, put in $20 million.
Truveta’s total funding to date is nearly $500 million. The startup previously raised money from Microsoft, which is the “exclusive cloud provider” for the genome project.
Truveta is led by CEO Terry Myerson, a former Microsoft executive who led the company’s Windows and Devices group.
“Discoveries from smaller datasets before today’s AI have led to important new approaches to help prevent heart disease and restore hearing in children with certain forms of congenital deafness — it is so exciting to envision where a complete representative genomic dataset will guide us,” Myerson said in a statement.
Truveta in 2023 rolled out its own AI model designed to crunch through medical texts and extract patient diagnoses, medications, lab results and other data from sources like physician’s notes and insurance claims.
The company, which has more than 300 employees, previously raised $95 million in 2021. It’s ranked No. 14 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top privately held startups across the Pacific Northwest, and landed on LinkedIn’s recent “Top 50 startups” list.
Truveta joins cybersecurity firm Chainguard as recent Seattle-area startups to top a valuation of $1 billion. New unicorns have been harder to spot in the Seattle region in the past few years, mirroring a trend nationally as valuations took a hit amid the broader venture capital slowdown.
https://ift.tt/9EwWAZ8 January 13, 2025 at 03:43PM GeekWire
Post a Comment
0Comments