Nference Secures $60 Million Series B Funding to Advance Its Genomic Data Deep Learning Platform

VCBeat (WeChat ID: vcbeat) has learned that on January 8, 2020, local time, medical artificial intelligence company Nference announced the completion of a $60 million Series B financing round. The majority of the funding came from Mayo Clinic Ventures, with NTT Venture Capital also participating.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Nference specializes in the research and development of deep learning software for the biomedical field. The company is currently developing a platform that integrates biomedical knowledge from scientific, regulatory, and commercial literature to support drug discovery and development, drug lifecycle management, and precision medicine. Nference also stated that it will use the new funds from its latest financing round to advance the development of this platform.

“Our platform can process primarily unstructured health information, such as clinical records, case reports, scientific literature, pathology images, electrocardiogram waveforms, and genomic sequences,” said Murali Aravamudan, Founder and CEO of Nference, in a statement. “Causal inference of genotype-phenotype relationships necessitates large-scale triangulation across diverse individuals within biomedical knowledge.”

Venky Soundararajan, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Nference, added, “We are delighted to expand the impact of data science alongside our biopharmaceutical partners. They can effectively leverage our platform to pursue broader applications of therapeutics and digital health, thereby benefiting more patients.”

It is reported that Nference and the Mayo Clinic previously established a joint venture, Qrativ, to collaborate on synthesizing and analyzing genomic and clinical data from public databases and Mayo Clinic research, with the aim of informing drug discovery.

In 2018, Nference also completed an $11 million Series A financing round, led by Matrix Partners, with participation from its previous investor, Matrix Capital Management.

Nference is building a holistic software platform to integrate knowledge from biomedical fields that are experiencing growing interest but remain relatively niche and fragmented. Leveraging state-of-the-art neural networks, Nference triangulates unstructured and structured information from biomedical literature, large-scale molecular data, and real-world datasets to automatically generate relevant insights in real time. The Nference platform supports a wide range of applications required for commercial strategy and operations across the life sciences ecosystem, from research and development to market deployment.

(Compiled by Ning Chen)