Lifebit Biotech has completed a $60 million Series B funding round led by Tiger Global Management. Existing investors Eurazeo, Pentech Ventures, and Beacon Capital also participated. Lifebit is a biomedical software firm that offers a suite of AI-powered software solutions and builds in-house enterprise data platforms to accelerate drug discovery and development.
“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 Maria Chatzou Dunford, Lifebit CEO and former bioinformatics researcher.
“It’s great to see how excited our investors are to support our mission and our first-of-its-kind transformative technology. 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,” she added.
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.”
It’s estimated that by 2025, 500 million human genomes will have been sequenced, amassing more data than YouTube and Twitter combined, but only a fraction of that data is being used for drug discovery and precision medicine. The World Economic Forum states that 97% of all data produced by hospitals each year goes untouched. This is because the data needed for such work is often inaccessible and unusable because of governance, regulations, privacy and security concerns, or inadequate technology.
But it has been proven, for example, that healthcare providers give faster diagnosis and more targeted treatments for four to five times more rare disease patients when human genetic data is involved. Furthermore, research has found that when developing novel drug compounds, those with human genetic data evidence are twice as likely to become clinically approved drugs.
Lifebit’s current contracts include a project to build Hong Kong’s first population-scale genome sequencing initiative—the Hong Kong Genome Project—and a long-term AI-partnership with German pharma giant Boehringer Ingelheim. Lifebit 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—a project considered to be the global pioneer in population genomics.
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 analyze 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 analyze this data collaboratively in conjunction with their other complementary datasets. That’s a very powerful value proposition.”
The Series B funding round, led by Tiger Global, will be used to further Lifebit’s global expansion and enable the company to “double down on client success – fueling further support for existing partners, as well as those to come.” In addition to the investment, Lifebit will leverage Tiger Global’s expertise in scaling software companies and accelerating product development as it expands globally.
