Immune Monitoring Platform Ozette Raises $6 Million

By Dan Anderson • Feb 23, 2021
  • Ozette — the creators of a cutting-edge AI-powered Immune Monitoring Platform — recently announced $6 million in seed financing led by Madrona Venture Group. These are the details.

Ozette — the creators of a cutting-edge AI-powered Immune Monitoring Platform — recently announced $6 million in seed financing led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and Vulcan Capital. And Ozette, a collaboration between the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and AI2, will use the seed funding to accelerate breakthroughs in treating disease.

Ozette’s founders include Fred Hutch scientists Raphael Gottardo, Greg Finak, and Evan Greene — who have helped pioneer single-cell computational analysis over the past decade along with physician and entrepreneur Ali Ansary.

The company’s Immune Monitoring Platform enables scientists to quickly extract reliable insights from single-cell data across instruments, experiments, and disease states. And having this fully annotated data allows interpretable results for critical decision-making that will improve patient care and patient outcomes.

Ozette will revolutionize the next phase of medicine by:

– Providing the platform to empower scientists who are working with single-cell data.

– Automating the manual and labor-intensive process of cell analysis from months of work to just hours.

– And unlocking personalized medicine through targeted therapies based on the profiles of individuals’ immune systems.

KEY QUOTES:

“We’ve spent a decade working at Fred Hutch to catalyze high-dimensional computational single-cell analysis in academia and industry. Today we can see the composition of the immune system at a much higher resolution. This deeper level of insight is critical to developing effective disease treatments with fewer side effects and that is something everyone can feel good about.”

— Greg Finak, Co-Founder andCTO at Ozette

“What Ozette is delivering to science and medicine is game-changing because it sheds light on the entire cell profile of the immune system, not just only a small percentage of it. Ozette brings together the power of computational biology and data science to the life sciences by building a platform that researchers, academics, and biopharmaceutical companies are able to leverage to find treatments faster than ever before.”

— Matt McIlwain, Managing Director at Madrona

“Think of the Ozette Immune Monitoring Platform like an MRI for the immune system. Where an MRI shows detailed images around the anatomical structures, our technology delivers a high-resolution view of the immune system at the single-cell level, providing details that haven’t been visible before. This makes treatments safer, faster to develop and personalized for patients.”

— Dr. Ali Ansary, Co-Founder and CEO of Ozette

“At AI2 we are constantly looking for scientific potential in artificial intelligence that has the power to improve daily lives, and Ozette does just that. Ozette’s Immune Monitoring Platform is exactly what scientists and researchers have been looking for. By allowing organizations to make discoveries faster, and with less risk, it will transform how we interact with medicine.”

— Professor Oren Etzioni, CEO of AI2