Seqera Labs lands €22M in Series A funding for its data orchestration and workflow platform for life sciences

Seqera Labs, a provider of open-source data orchestration and workflow software for life sciences, has raised €22 million in Series A funding led by Addition, with follow-on funding from Talis Capital, Speedinvest, BoxOne Ventures, and Amino Collective.

The Barcelona-based Seqera Labs will use the cash infusion to bolster its team, as well as expand its product portfolio to be able to cover the entire data analysis lifecycle. The latest 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.

With this investment, Seqera also aims to move beyond scientific workflows to encompass tool development, data management, reporting, infrastructure deployment, and interactive computing.

Seqera — a portmanteau of “sequence” and “era,” was pivotal in the fight against Covid-19 variant detection. Its open-source software was used by labs and pharma giants like AstraZeneca, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Oxford Nanopore to sequence, discover, and track Alpha, Delta, and Omicron variants of the virus.

Founded in 2018 by CEO Evan Floden and Paolo Di Tommaso, Seqera is a data orchestration and workflow platform designed to help engineers and scientists gain insights from troves of its cloud-based genomic data.

The Series A funding 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’s goal is to empower scientists to assemble and deploy massively scalable data analysis pipelines in multi-cloud environments with minimal friction.

Tower, the company’s flagship 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.

In a statement, Floden said: “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),  a biomedical research center based out of Barcelona, 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 that 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.