To cure diseases, researchers and scientists need to access and use as much biomedical data as possible, which are often inaccessible and unusable. Here’s where London-based genomic data startup Lifebit.ai comes into play.
The UK company democratises access to global biomedical data, allowing researchers, organisations, and public bodies to access and analyse vital information in the pursuit of life-changing precision medicine and drug discovery.
Secured £44.3M
In the latest development, Lifebit.ai has secured a $60 million (approx £44.3 million) Series B funding round, led by global technology investment firm Tiger Global Management. Existing investors including Eurazeo, Pentech Ventures, and Beacon Capital also participated.
How will the funding be used?
The company will use the funds for global expansion with a focus on customer success and accelerating the growth of its team. Further, the company will leverage Tiger Global’s depth of expertise in scaling software companies and accelerating product development.
Democratising access to global biomedical data
Founded in 2017, Lifebit builds enterprise data platforms for use by organisations with complex and sensitive biomedical datasets.
From providing Trusted Research Environments for national precision medicine programmes to enabling pharmaceutical companies to discover new drug targets, the UK company empowers customers across the public and private sectors to transform how they leverage sensitive biomedical data.
Through Lifebit’s suite of AI-powered, end-to-end software solutions, these platforms are also able to provide faster data insights, accelerate drug discovery pipelines, and improve clinical trials success.
Lifebit’s clients
As a result, the company has acquired numerous high-profile clients across the public and private sectors including the Hong Kong Genome Project, and a long-term AI partnership with German pharma giant Boehringer Ingelheim.
The company also won the UK Government contract to power Genomics England with its 135,000-strong cohort of cancer, rare disease, and COVID-19 patient data.
“We believe all biomedical data that can be used to save lives, should be used. People are dying because of how this data is being handled, and making distributed highly sensitive biomedical data usable while keeping it secure in place and combining it with other data has never been possible. Until now,” said Dr. Maria Chatzou Dunford, Lifebit CEO, and former bioinformatics researcher. “With this new strategic backing, we will continue to expand our global presence, with a specific focus on customer success and accelerating the growth of our team.”
Partner at Tiger Global, John Curtius, added: “We are confident that Lifebit’s innovative and industry-leading software solutions, paired with their customer-first approach, will drive rapid global adoption and accelerate breakthroughs in precision medicine.”
Parker Moss, CCO at Genomics England, said “A challenge facing the precision medicine field lies in data governance. With strict national regulatory frameworks, there’s a real pressing need to leave data at rest but to analyse it alongside international datasets and integrate it through federated links. Lifebit’s technology addresses this issue – keeping patients’ data secure and privacy protected in our dataset while enabling researchers from academia and pharma to analyse this data collaboratively in conjunction with their other complementary datasets. That’s a very powerful value proposition.”
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