Seqera Labs raises €22 million in Series A funding led by Addition

Seqera Labs, the leading provider of data orchestration and workflow software for life sciences, announced that it has raised €22 million in Series A funding. The financing was led by Addition, with follow-on funding from Talis Capital, Speedinvest, BoxOne Ventures and Amino Collective.

The additional funding will help Seqera Labs bolster its team, as well as to expand its product portfolio to be able to cover the entire data analysis lifecycle. The raise builds on the €4.4 million raised in seed financing last year, plus several grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Priscilla Chan.

The Series A follows a period of strong growth, with a 400% year-over-year revenue increase and a tripling of employees over the last 12 months. Seqera Labs was also pivotal to the Covid-19 variant detection with its technology used to discover and track Alpha, Delta and Omicron variants of the virus.

Tower, the company’s flagship workflows and data analysis platform, has also managed to expand its footprint and achieve rapid adoption, being used by over 150 leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including AstraZeneca, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Oxford Nanopore and Invitae.

Evan Floden, Co-Founder and CEO at Seqera Labs, comments:

“Partnering with Addition, alongside our existing investors, Speedinvest and Talis Capital, as well as Boxone and Amino, demonstrates their belief in our direction and our ability to execute. Our ambition is to develop a portfolio of innovative products that positively impact millions of patients worldwide by optimizing drug research and discovery costs. We are delighted to be able to count on their support in achieving this goal.”

Jason Schneider, of Addition, adds:

“The biotechnology industry is undergoing a transformational shift and organizations must rapidly expand their capacity to process complex data at scale. Seqera Labs’ products make this easier than ever before and allow research teams to remain focused on their critical work. We’re proud to support Evan and his talented team as they continue on their impressive growth trajectory and lead breakthrough innovations in healthcare and life sciences.”

Founded in 2018 as a spin-off from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), following the initial success of Nextflow, Seqera Labs aims to accelerate discovery and therapeutic breakthroughs through foundational open science software.

The team created Nextflow in 2013, the popular open-source workflow and data orchestration software which has become an industry standard among cloud providers, sequencing companies and genomics platforms. Today, Nextflow is used by thousands of organizations worldwide, is downloaded more than 55,000 times monthly, and is among the most successful open-source software projects in life sciences.

Kirill Tasilov, General Partner at Talis Capital, comments:

“Seqera is rapidly becoming a de facto standard for complex data processing in life sciences and biology. We are beyond excited to continue supporting them on their journey of bringing the entire industry into the modern age.”

Dominik Tobschall, Partner, Speedinvest adds:

“Seqera Labs is a prime and exciting example of successful commercial open-source software being built in Europe. Evan and his team’s mission to empower scientists and accelerate time to results continues to consistently produce both community growth and commercial success - nothing short of spectacular! We’re excited to keep supporting the team.”

Milad Alucozai, Head of Life Sciences of BoxOne Ventures, adds:

“We are living in a new era for biology, where research is driven by the convergence of powerful technologies along with new concepts and methods. Seqera is building a dedicated solution for scientists and engineers to be more productive and creative across academia, startups, and large pharma. The rapid adoption of Nextflow is a testament to Evan and the team listening closely to their open-source community to help them prioritize roadmaps and understand the issues faced by users in their day-to-day work. We have been delighted to support them since the very beginning and look forward to achieving our shared vision of empowering scientists and engineers around the world.”

Seqera Labs is dedicated to empowering scientists to assemble and deploy massively scalable data analysis pipelines in multi-cloud environments with minimal friction. With this latest investment, Seqera aims to move beyond scientific workflows to encompass tool development, data management, reporting, infrastructure deployment, and interactive computing.