- Latch Bio — a company building data infrastructure for the biocomputing revolution — announced the closing of a $5 million seed funding round. These are the details.
Latch Bio — a company building data infrastructure for the biocomputing revolution — announced the closing of a $5 million seed funding round led by Lux Capital with participation from General Catalyst, Haystack, Fifty Years, and Asimov co-founder and CEO, Alec Nielsen, Ph.D. And The company has also announced the launch of its first-of-a-kind web-based platform which enables any biologist to analyze CRISPR data without any code or cloud infrastructure setup.
Launched in 2021, Latch Bio was founded by Alfredo Andere, Kyle Giffin, and Kenny Workman — who met as undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley. Combining their backgrounds in engineering and computer science, they formed Latch Bio to build infrastructure for scientists who need ready-to-run solutions to advance their research. And the Latch platform is a web-first solution that addresses some of the primary challenges facing CRISPR researchers, namely access to bioinformatics experts and the implementation of cloud resources.
With the Latch platform, any researcher can now create a centralized one-stop-shop for storing, transforming and visualizing their data without writing any code. And through the Latch plugins, users can import files from their existing data stack including Amazon S3, Benchling, and Illumina’s BaseSpace.
Biologists have access to dozens of popular workflows including CRISPResso, MAGeCK, CasTLE, Cas.py, MultiQC, and CasOffinder, etc. And after performing a specific workflow, users can further interrogate the results using the built-in genomic visualizer and quality controls. The Latch platform is offered free to academic research users.
KEY QUOTES:
“Like genomics before it, the CRISPR community is facing a tsunami of data and a dearth of computational tools required for their analyses. As a result, skilled bioinformaticians are in high demand, and researchers are waiting days for what can be completed in a couple hours. The Latch team has made it possible for any researcher in any lab to open a web browser, upload data and execute a powerful computational pipeline without having to enter a single line of code or build any sort of cloud infrastructure. By empowering the researcher, Latch is helping remove a significant bottleneck that is currently slowing down the whole CRISPR research cycle.”
— Brandon Reeves, Partner, Lux Capital
“Since 2015, the ChristianaCare Gene Editing Institute has been at the forefront of innovation in advancing the use of gene editing to support improved human health. Access to the right tools is essential to our success. The Latch platform, which includes ChristianaCare’s DECODR program, will provide immediate access to a wide range of popular CRISPR workflows that will further accelerate our discovery and translational research programs.”
— Pawel Bialk, M.S., principal investigator at the Gene Editing Institute
“With the public launch of the Latch platform, we have officially begun our campaign to build and disseminate the data infrastructure for the biocomputing revolution.”
— Kenny Workman, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer
“CRISPR scientists who are committed to changing the world deserve the best software, and at Latch we actually listen to them, then build what they want. We want to be their champion and build solutions that make their job easier.”
— Kyle Giffin, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer
“We look forward to working closely with our users, who are each revolutionizing the capabilities of gene-editing and will be invaluable partners as we continue to improve the Latch platform. We are at the very beginning of realizing our vision and look forward to working closely with our advisors and growing base of users to further expand the platform’s capabilities.”
— Alfredo Andere, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer
