Flywheel secures $15M funding to help medical researchers improve scientific collaboration and accelerate life-saving therapeutic discoveries

Medical research is hard. As such, any tools to improve productivity and collaboration is welcomed by researchers and scientists. Flywheel is a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based health-tech startup that is transforming research productivity, collaboration, and reproducibility with a next-generation platform for imaging and machine learning in life sciences, clinical, and academic research.

Flywheel provides a data management and analysis platform built specifically for scientists and the researcher’s workflow. The company accelerates new scientific discoveries in life-science, biotech, and academic imaging research through cloud-scale collaboration. As a result, imaging researchers are able to avoid innovation bottlenecks, and accelerate discovery by doing more science, and less IT.

Today, Flywheel announced it has secured $15 million in Series B funding to deepen its presence in the life sciences and AI markets and accelerate product development to power the digital transformation strategies of life sciences, clinical, and academic institutions globally. The round was co-led by Beringea, Novartis dRx Capital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Great North Labs, iSelect, and Argonautic Ventures.

Founded in 2012 by Brian Wandell, Gunnar Schaefer, and Troy Kopischke, Flywheel empowers research momentum by focusing on data and medical image capture, content management, scientific computation, and collaboration.

“Flywheel’s impressive list of client institutions and enthusiastic adoption by world leaders in clinical and academic research prove the platform’s transformative potential. Its value proposition is not only as a market disruptor but as a tool to change the way life science research is conducted and help make life-changing discoveries faster. We’re excited to be part of this fast-growing Midwest company and support the work of its passionately committed team,” said William Blake III, Vice President at Beringea.

With reproducible research in mind, they combine open-source methods from top universities, a modern web user interface, and an extensible compute engine based on containerization technology. The result is a software platform to accelerate discovery and help researchers do science, not IT.

“It is our strong belief that the leading life science institutions of the next decade will succeed by taking advantage of their biomedical data. Flywheel’s product is the best-in-class infrastructure to fulfill this vision,” said Francisco Gimenez, Partner at 8VC. “We are excited to support the company as they help support the future of bioscience R&D.”

“We are incredibly excited by the opportunities ahead for Flywheel as we enable healthcare and research organizations to accelerate innovation in imaging research, machine learning, and clinical trials. This new round of funding will allow us to more quickly scale and grow our business to help more organizations improve scientific collaboration and accelerate discoveries that will change the way healthcare is delivered,” said Jim Olson, CEO, Flywheel.