Watershed Informatics – a developer of a multi-omics insight platform for biopharmaceutical discovery teams – announced the closing of a $14.5 million Series A funding round led by Canvas Ventures with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Accomplice Ventures. This funding round enables Watershed to strengthen commercial traction, accelerate product innovation, and ultimately transform how scientists discover medicines with multi-omics.
Genomics and multi-omics are a set of technologies and approach that offer an unprecedented amount of data and detail for scientists to understand all levels of biological activity. And ever since the first human genome was sequenced, scientists have been hoping to turn this type of data into cures. With recent explosive advancements in high throughput lab instrumentation, AI-powered analytics, and cloud computing, this revolution is finally within reach.
And even though tools for building precision medicines exist, they remain fragmented.
Integrating these tools is simply off-limits to all except for the best-funded institutions, requiring massive time and resource commitments but without any guarantee of success. In order to address this unmet need, Watershed has developed Omics Bench, a platform for bringing together disparate tools into one unified ecosystem on the cloud, empowering scientists to go from sample to therapeutic insight in a single day.
The Omics Bench provides comprehensive workflows and associated visualizations for whole-genome sequencing, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, microbial sequencing, and protein folding. And by having the right balance between simplicity and functionality, Watershed has attracted a growing community of users aiming to design and iterate experiments with confidence and ease.
KEY QUOTES:
“While the size and variety of data in the life sciences has grown exponentially for the past two decades, there remains a lack of centralized and collaborative platforms serving both biologists and bioinformaticians. After years of tackling tough high-performance computing and user interface challenges, we have invented new ways for any user—regardless of computational skill—to independently create, seamlessly share, and expertly customize multi-omics workflows.”
— Watershed co-founder and CEO Jonathan Wang
“Watershed has been executing at an incredible pace for the last three years, creating an exceptional platform that solves real-world drug discovery needs. We are excited to partner with them as they continue to break down barriers impeding biomedical discovery.”
— Paul Hsiao, founding partner at Canvas Ventures, who has joined the company’s Board of Directors
