Edico Genome Raises $22M to Expand Data Processing and Web Services

San Diego’s Edico Genome, highlighted in Monday’s media debut of Dell Technologies Capital, said today it has raised $22 million in Series B financing led by the Dell investment arm. All existing investors, including Qualcomm Ventures, Axon Ventures, and biotech industry executive Greg Lucier, participated in the round.

The new cash, which brings Edico’s total funding to $32 million, will be used to fuel expansion and further development of Edico’s Dragen technology. There’s a lot of additional engineering and software development that needs to be done, and Edico also plans to expand its sales and marketing team, CEO Pieter van Rooyen said yesterday. He expects the company will grow from 50 employees to close to 60 by the end of the year.

In 2014, Edico introduced its Dragen processor on a standard computer expansion bus (similar to a graphics processing card) as a combination of hardware and software that was optimized for genomics data processing. The Edico chip, a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), was intended to accelerate the process of reading sequenced nucleotides—A, C, T, or G—from the short DNA segments produced by high-throughput sequencing, and to align them with a reference genome. It’s a computationally intensive process referred to as genome “mapping” that Edico has reduced from 20 hours to 20 minutes.

The company sells its technology to high-throughput genome sequencing centers, academic research institutions, and clinical labs, accelerating the processing time for clinical diagnoses and scientific insights. Edico says its customers have cumulatively processed more than 12 petabytes of genomic data. (If a byte of data was a single grain of rice, Edico says one petabyte would be enough rice to blanket Manhattan.)

Edico also has established technology partnerships with Dell EMC, Intel, IBM, Amazon Web Services, and others to develop cloud-based services for analyzing and storing genomic data. Under this software-as-a-service model, van Rooyen said, “We get paid for the number of DNA petabases that get sequenced.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.