Global Life Science Company DNAnexus Raises $100 Million

By Dan Anderson • Jun 10, 2020
  • DNAnexus, a cloud-based SaaS company that is serving the global life science community, announced it closed a $100 million funding round

DNAnexus, a cloud-based SaaS company that is serving the global life science community, announced it closed a $100 million funding round led by Perceptive Advisors and Northpond Ventures. These investors are joining investors GV, Foresite Capital, TPG Capital, First Round Capital, and first time equity investor Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.

The funds will advance the company’s growth globally and it enables DNAnexus to further serve leading healthcare and life science organizations. And the DNAnexus Platform is known for accelerating digital transformation by simplifying complex data analysis, clinical data management, and insights at a scale not previously possible.

DNAnexus customers use 10 million core processing hours a month and now they are storing 28 petabytes of data, which is a number that has grown 70% per year in each over the the last four years. In the past 10 years, DNAnexus pioneered a cloud-based informatics platform founded on genomics while responding to the rapidly growing customer need for integration of genomics with other complex datasets and the tools that make data valuable.

The company’s customers include 8 of the top 10 clinical diagnostics companies, 7 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies, and prominent national medical centers. And this global network supports some of the largest human genome sequencing projects in the world as well as FDA’s precisionFDA platform.

As Precision Medicine is gaining momentum, pharmaceutical, clinical diagnostics, and medical centers understand the need for an enterprise-grade health informatics platform with the latest scaling, security, analytics, and knowledge management technologies. And through its global platform, DNAnexus provides the answer for companies to keep pace with the technical complexity demanded by population-scale.

Key Quotes:

“This financing drives advancement of our data science technologies benefiting our rapidly growing customer base. The next wave of biomedical insights and treatments will be driven by large-scale clinical, multi-omics, and real world data resulting from cross-institutional collaborations. Our customers have continued to grow during the current COVID-19 epidemic using the virtual cloud workspace we provide. The trend toward cloud-based data analysis and collaboration is accelerating, and we are at the right place at the right time to future-proof and serve our customers.”

– Richard Daly, Chief Executive Officer at DNAnexus

“DNAnexus has changed how global diagnostics and biomedical R&D markets manage their data and infrastructures. We are impressed with the velocity of DNAnexus’ growth, the breadth of its customers and partners, and the company’s dedication to innovation and technology. It couldn’t be clearer that the integration of clinical and genomic data is driving Precision Medicine, and DNAnexus is leading this space.”

– Sam Chawla of Perceptive Advisors

“The Precision Medicine market is poised to exceed $119 billion by 2026. Many pharmaceutical companies and medical centers are adopting strategies rooted in human genetics because evidence shows that the odds of a drug’s clinical success doubles if associated with specific biomarkers. Providing the ecosystem with a tool to analyze and gain insights from all these massive datasets is a difficult undertaking. DNAnexus has a proven product that scales.”

– Michael Rubin, M.D., Ph.D, Founder and CEO of Northpond Ventures