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Immunai raises $60M as it expands from improving immune therapies to discovering new ones, too
Just three years after its founding, biotech startup Immunai has raised $60 million in Series A funding, bringing its total raised to over $80 million. Despite its youth, Immunai has already established the largest database in the world for single cell immunity characteristics, and it has already used its machine learning-powered immunity analysts platform to enhance the performance of existing immunotherapies. Aided by this new funding, it’s now ready to expand into the development of entirely new therapies based on the strength and breadth of its data and ML.
Immunai’s approach to developing new insights around the human immune system uses a “multiomic” approach — essentially layering analysis of different types of biological data, including a cell’s genome, microbiome, epigenome (a genome’s chemical instruction set) and more. The startup’s unique edge is in combining the largest and richest data set of its type available, formed in partnership with world-leading immunological research organizations, with its own machine learning technology to deliver analytics at unprecedented scale.
“I hope it doesn’t sound corny, but we don’t have the luxury to move more slowly,” explained Immunai co-founder and CEO Noam Solomon in an interview. “Because I think that we are in kind of a perfect storm, where a lot of advances in machine learning and compute computations have led us to the point where we can actually leverage those methods to mine important insights. You have a limit or ceiling to how fast you can go by the number of people that you have — so I think with the vision that we have, and thanks to our very large network between MIT and Cambridge to Stanford in the Bay Area, and Tel Aviv, we just moved very quickly to harness people to say, let’s solve this problem together.”
Solomon and his co-founder and CTO Luis Voloch both have extensive computer science and machine learning backgrounds, and they initially connected and identified a need for the application of this kind of technology in immunology. Scientific co-founder and SVP of Strategic Research Danny Wells then helped them refine their approach to focus on improving efficacy of immunotherapies designed to treat cancerous tumors.
Immunai has already demonstrated that its platform can help identify optimal targets for existing therapies, including in a partnership with the Baylor College of Medicine where it assisted with a cell therapy product for use in treating neuroblastoma (a type of cancer that develops from immune cells, often in the adrenal glands). The company is now also moving into new territory with therapies, using its machine learning platform and industry-leading cell database to new therapy discovery — not only identifying and validating targets for existing therapies, but helping to create entirely new ones.
“We’re moving from just observing cells, but actually to going and perturbing them, and seeing what the outcome is,” explained Voloch. This, from the computational side, later allows us to move from correlative assessments to actually causal assessments, which makes our models a lot more powerful. Both on the computational side and on the lab side, this are really bleeding edge technologies that I think we will be the first to really put together at any kind of real scale.”
“The next step is to say, ‘Okay, now that we understand the human immune profile, can we develop new drugs?’,” said Solomon. “You can think about it like we’ve been building a Google Maps for the immune system for a few years — so we are mapping different roads and paths in the immune system. But at some point, we figured out that there are certain roads or bridges that haven’t been built yet. And we will be able to support building new roads and new bridges, and hopefully leading from current states of disease or cities of disease, to building cities of health.”
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As it closes in on Arm, Nvidia announces UK supercomputer dedicated to medical research
As Nvidia continues to work through its deal to acquire Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion, the computing giant is making another big move to lay out its commitment to investing in U.K. technology. Today the company announced plans to develop Cambridge-1, a new £40 million AI supercomputer that will be used for research in the health industry in the country, the first supercomputer built by Nvidia specifically for external research access, it said.
Nvidia said it is already working with GSK, AstraZeneca, London hospitals Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College London and Oxford Nanopore to use the Cambridge-1. The supercomputer is due to come online by the end of the year and will be the company’s second supercomputer in the country. The first is already in development at the company’s AI Center of Excellence in Cambridge, and the plan is to add more supercomputers over time.
The growing role of AI has underscored an interesting crossroads in medical research. On one hand, leading researchers all acknowledge the role it will be playing in their work. On the other, none of them (nor their institutions) have the resources to meet that demand on their own. That’s driving them all to get involved much more deeply with big tech companies like Google, Microsoft and, in this case, Nvidia, to carry out work.
Alongside the supercomputer news, Nvidia is making a second announcement in the area of healthcare in the U.K.: it has inked a partnership with GSK, which has established an AI hub in London, to build AI-based computational processes that will be used in drug vaccine and discovery — an especially timely piece of news, given that we are in a global health pandemic and all drug makers and researchers are on the hunt to understand more about, and build vaccines for, COVID-19.
The news is coinciding with Nvidia’s industry event, the GPU Technology Conference.
“Tackling the world’s most pressing challenges in healthcare requires massively powerful computing resources to harness the capabilities of AI,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, in his keynote at the event. “The Cambridge-1 supercomputer will serve as a hub of innovation for the U.K., and further the groundbreaking work being done by the nation’s researchers in critical healthcare and drug discovery.”
The company plans to dedicate Cambridge-1 resources in four areas, it said: industry research, in particular joint research on projects that exceed the resources of any single institution; university granted compute time; health-focused AI startups; and education for future AI practitioners. It’s already building specific applications in areas, like the drug discovery work it’s doing with GSK, that will be run on the machine.
The Cambridge-1 will be built on Nvidia’s DGX SuperPOD system, which can process 400 petaflops of AI performance and 8 petaflops of Linpack performance. Nvidia said this will rank it as the 29th fastest supercomputer in the world.
“Number 29” doesn’t sound very groundbreaking, but there are other reasons why the announcement is significant.
For starters, it underscores how the supercomputing market — while still not a mass-market enterprise — is increasingly developing more focus around specific areas of research and industries. In this case, it underscores how health research has become more complex, and how applications of artificial intelligence have both spurred that complexity but, in the case of building stronger computing power, also provides a better route — some might say one of the only viable routes in the most complex of cases — to medical breakthroughs and discoveries.
It’s also notable that the effort is being forged in the U.K. Nvidia’s deal to buy Arm has seen some resistance in the market — with one group leading a campaign to stop the sale and take Arm independent — but this latest announcement underscores that the company is already involved pretty deeply in the U.K. market, bolstering Nvidia’s case to double down even further. (Yes, chip reference designs and building supercomputers are different enterprises, but the argument for Nvidia is one of commitment and presence.)
“AI and machine learning are like a new microscope that will help scientists to see things that they couldn’t see otherwise,” said Dr. Hal Barron, chief scientific officer and president, R&D, GSK, in a statement. “NVIDIA’s investment in computing, combined with the power of deep learning, will enable solutions to some of the life sciences industry’s greatest challenges and help us continue to deliver transformational medicines and vaccines to patients. Together with GSK’s new AI lab in London, I am delighted that these advanced technologies will now be available to help the U.K.’s outstanding scientists.”
“The use of big data, supercomputing and artificial intelligence have the potential to transform research and development; from target identification through clinical research and all the way to the launch of new medicines,” added James Weatherall, PhD, head of Data Science and AI, AstraZeneca, in his statement.
“Recent advances in AI have seen increasingly powerful models being used for complex tasks such as image recognition and natural language understanding,” said Sebastien Ourselin, head, School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences at King’s College London. “These models have achieved previously unimaginable performance by using an unprecedented scale of computational power, amassing millions of GPU hours per model. Through this partnership, for the first time, such a scale of computational power will be available to healthcare research – it will be truly transformational for patient health and treatment pathways.”
Dr. Ian Abbs, chief executive & chief medical director of Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust Officer, said: “If AI is to be deployed at scale for patient care, then accuracy, robustness and safety are of paramount importance. We need to ensure AI researchers have access to the largest and most comprehensive datasets that the NHS has to offer, our clinical expertise, and the required computational infrastructure to make sense of the data. This approach is not only necessary, but also the only ethical way to deliver AI in healthcare – more advanced AI means better care for our patients.”
“Compact AI has enabled real-time sequencing in the palm of your hand, and AI supercomputers are enabling new scientific discoveries in large-scale genomic data sets,” added Gordon Sanghera, CEO, Oxford Nanopore Technologies. “These complementary innovations in data analysis support a wealth of impactful science in the U.K., and critically, support our goal of bringing genomic analysis to anyone, anywhere.”
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Higher Steaks brings home the bacon, revealing lab-grown pork belly and bacon strips
In what could be a starting gun for the commercialization of the cell-based meat business, upstart cultivated meat company Higher Steaks said it has managed to produce samples of its first products — bacon strips and pork belly made in a lab from cellular material.
With the revelation, Higher Steaks, a bootstrapped Cambridge, U.K.-based company, leapfrogs into a competitive position with a number of far larger companies that have raised far more capital.
“There’s still a lot of work until it’s commercial,” said Higher Steaks chief executive Benjamina Bollag, “but the revelation of a pork belly product that’s made from 50% cultivated cells and a bacon product which contains 70% meat grown from a cell material in a laboratory is something of a milestone for the industry.”
The remaining ingredients in Higher Steaks bacon and pork belly are a mixture of plant base, proteins, fats and starches to bind the cellular material together. To achieve this first step on its road to commercialization, Higher Steaks tapped the expertise of an undisclosed chef to formulate the meat into an approximation of the pork belly and bacon.
Higher Steaks head of research and development, Ruth Helen Faram (left) and chief executive Benjamina Bollag (right) Image Credits: Higher Steaks (opens in a new window)
At this stage, the pilot was more to show what Higher Steaks can do rather than what the company will do, said Bollag.
“In the future it will be scaffolding,” said Bollag. “It’s more showing what our meat can do and what we’re working on. In the future it will be with scaffolding.”
A number of companies, including Tantti Laboratories, Matrix Meats and Prellis Biologics, make the kind of biomaterial nano-scale scaffolding that could be used as a frame on which to grow structures equivalent to the fibrous textures of muscle.
The commercial viability of products from companies like Higher Steaks, Memphis Meats, Aleph Farms, Meatable, Integriculture, Mosa Meat and Supermeat depends on more than just companies like Tantti and Matrix, but also on the ability of Thermo Fisher, Future Fields and Merck to bring down the cost of the cell cultures that are required to grow the animal cells.
In all, some 30 cell-based meat startups have launched globally since 2014, and they’re all looking for a slice of the $1.4 trillion meat market.
Meanwhile, demand for pork continues to rise even as supplies have been decimated by an outbreak of African Swine Fever that could have killed as much as 40% of China’s population of pigs in 2019.
“Our mission is to provide meat that is healthy and sustainable without the consumer making any sacrifices on taste,” said Bollag in a statement. “The production of the first ever cultivated bacon and pork belly is proof that new techniques can help meet overwhelming demand for pork products globally.”
Given the highly capitalized competitors that Higher Steaks faces off against, the company is looking for industry partners to help commercialize its technology.
To improve its competitive position, Higher Steaks recently hired Dr. James Clark, the former chief technology officer of PredictImmune.
“I was always quite intrigued by cultured meat production, a mix of both science and food production. In 2013 I watched the first cultured meat burger from Mark Post costing £250,000, cooked on the BBC,” said Clark. “I was approached about joining Higher Steaks earlier this year and was attracted to joining primarily by the science along with the ambition and energy of the Higher Steaks founder Benjamina Bollag . I believe Higher Steaks is a company with a technology to be disruptive in the cultured meat area and at my career stage I was looking for a challenge.”
Brought in to scale the cultivated meat process at Higher Steaks, Clark has led the development of biotech and pharma products at early-stage and publicly traded companies.
“The addition of Dr. James Clark to the team gives Higher Steaks a significant advantage,” said Dr. Ruth Helen Faram, head of R&D. “Cultivated pork belly and bacon have never been demonstrated before and Higher Steaks is the first to develop a prototype containing over 70% cultivated pork muscle, without the use of bovine serum.”
Consumers shouldn’t expect to see Higher Steaks’ pork belly on store shelves or in restaurants anytime soon, Bollag cautioned. “We’re still in the thousands of pounds per kilogram.”
The company does expect to have a larger tasting event later this year.
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Cervest raises £3.7M for Earth Science AI platform to predict climate effects
Climate risk, including extreme events and the related pressures our environment, are fundamentally affecting the way businesses and governments operate — both tactically and strategically. Increasing climate volatility is causing food supply disruptions and increasing pressure on Enterprises (including financial institutions, insurers and producers) to disclose what’s going on.
The trouble is, while there is a lot of data about all this, its complexity, incompleteness and sheer volume is too vast for humans to process with the tools available today. So just as the climate changes, we are faced with “data chaos.” Equally, other parts of the world suffer from data scarcity, making it much harder to provide useful and timely analysis.
So the challenge is to address these issues simultaneously. So a new startup, Cervest, has created an AI-driven platform designed to inform the decision-making capabilities of businesses, governments and growers in the face of increasing climate volatility.
Cervest, has now closed a £3.7 million investment round to fund the launch of its real-time, climate forecasting platform.
The round was led by deep-tech investor Future Positive Capital, with co-investor Astanor Ventures . The seed-stage funding round brings the company’s total funding to more than £4.5 million.
Built on three years of research and development by a team of scientists, mathematicians, developers and engineers, Cervest says its Earth Science AI platform can analyze billions of data points to forecast how changes in the climate will impact the future of entire countries, right down to individual landscapes.
It does this by combining research and modeling techniques taken from proven Earth sciences — including atmospheric science, meteorology, hydrology and agronomy — with artificial intelligence, imaging, machine learning and Bayesian statistics.
Using large collections of satellite imagery and probability theory, the platform can identify signals, or early-warning signs, of extreme events such as floods, fires and strong winds. It also can spot changes in soil health and identify water risk.
Cervest says the platform could do such things as reveal the optimum location to build a new factory; warn a wheat grower that their crop yield isn’t expected to meet its targets; or be used by insurers to help them set premiums for the next 12 months.
The team comes from a network of more than 30 universities, including Imperial College, The Alan Turing Institute, Cambridge, UCL, Harvard and Oxford, and has published more than 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
A beta version of the platform is due to launch in Q1 2020.
Iggy Bassi, founder & CEO, Cervest said: “Our goal is to empower everyone to make informed decisions that improve the long-term resilience of our planet. Today decision-makers are struggling with climate uncertainty and extreme events and how they are affecting their business operations, assets, investments, or policy choices.”
Sofia Hmich, founder, Future Positive Capital said: “With reports suggesting we have fewer than 60 years of farming left unless drastic action is taken, the need for science-backed decisions could not be greater. Businesses and policymakers hold the key to change and with access to Cervest’s proprietary AI technology they can start to make that change a reality at low cost — before it’s too late.”
Bassi previously ran the impact-led agribusiness GADCO, which was supported by Acumen Fund, Soros, Gates Foundation, World Bank and Syngenta . Its impact was featured in UNDP, World Economic Forum, FT, The Guardian and Huff Post. He previously built a software company focused on data analytics.
Cervest was inspired by Bassi’s experience building a farm-to-market agribusiness whilst confronting first-hand the impacts of climate and natural resource volatilities.
The Cervest team includes eight scientists and four PhDs. Between them, they have published more than 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers with more than 3,000 citations in high-profile titles, including Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and The Royal Statistical Society.
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AI security startup Darktrace’s CEO defeats buzzword bingo with trust and transparency
It takes a lot of trust to allow a company to come in and install a mystery box on their network to monitor for threats. It’s like inviting in a security guard to sit in your living room to make sure nobody breaks in.
Yet that’s exactly what Darktrace does. (The box, not the security guard.)
The Cambridge U.K.-founded company, now with a second headquarters in San Francisco, assumes that any network can be breached. Instead of looking at the perimeter of a network, Darktrace uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to scan and identify security weaknesses and malicious traffic inside a company’s network.
Traditional network monitoring typically uses signature-based threat detection of matching against known malicious files, but can be easily modified to evade detection. Instead, Darktrace builds up a profile of the network to understand what the baseline “normal” looks like so it can spot and identify potential issues, like large amounts of data exfiltration or suspect devices.
But how do you win over those who see a sea of meaningless buzzwords? How can you differentiate between the smoke and mirrors and the real deal?
“No one wants the black box making decisions without them knowing what it’s doing,” said Nicole Eagan, Darktrace’s co-founder and chief executive, in a call with TechCrunch.
“So, let them have visibility,” she said.
Darktrace’s founders have roots in the U.K. and U.S. intelligence, where they took what they knew of the cybersecurity threats to the private sector to where the new battleground opened up. In the past half-decade of its existence, the company has gained major clients on its roster — from telcos to banks, tech giants and car makers — supported by 900 staff in over 40 offices around the world.
About a quarter of its customers are in financial services, said Eagan. But it takes a lot for the heavily regulated companies to trust a mystery device on a company’s network where the data and security, like financial services, is highly regulated.
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DNA Script picks up $38.5 million to make DNA production faster and simpler
DNA Script has raised $38.5 million in new financing to commercialize a process that it claims is the first big leap forward in manufacturing genetic material.
The revolution in synthetic biology that’s reshaping industries from medicine to agriculture rests on three, equally important pillars.
They include: analytics — the ability to map the genome and understand the function of different genes; synthesis — the ability to manufacture DNA to achieve certain functions; and gene editing — the CRISPR-based technologies that allow for the addition or subtraction of genetic code.
New technologies have already been introduced to transform the analytics and editing of genomes, but little progress has been made over the past 50 years in the ways in which genetic material is manufactured. That’s exactly the problem that DNA Script is trying to solve.
Traditionally, making DNA involved the use of chemical compounds to synthesize (or write) DNA in chains that were limited to around 200 nucleotide bases. Those synthetic pieces of genetic code are then assembled to make a gene.
DNA Script’s technology holds the promise of making longer chains of nucleotides by mirroring the enzymatic process through which DNA is assembled within cells — with fewer errors and no chemical waste material. The enzymatic process can accelerate commercial applications in healthcare, chemical manufacturing and agriculture.
“Any technology that can make that faster is going to be very valuable,” says Christopher Voigt, a synthetic biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, told the journal Nature.
DNA Script isn’t the only company in the market that’s looking to make the leap forward in enzymatic DNA production. Nuclear, a startup working with Harvard University’s famed geneticist, George Church, and Ansa Bio, a startup affiliated with Jay Keasling’s Berkeley lab at the University of California, are also moving forward with the technology.
But the Paris-based company has achieved some milestones that would make its technology potentially the first to come to market with a commercially viable approach.
At least, that’s what new investors LSP and Bpifrance, through its Large Venture fund, are hoping. They’re joined by previous investors Illumina Ventures, M. Ventures, Sofinnova Partners, Kurma Partners and Idinvest Partners in backing the company’s latest funding.
The company said the money would be used to accelerate the development of its first products and establish a presence in the United States.
“As we announced earlier this year at the AGBT General Meeting, DNA Script was the first company to enzymatically synthesize a 200mer oligo de novo with an average coupling efficiency that rivals the best organic chemical processes in use today,” said Thomas Ybert, chief executive and co-founder of DNA Script. “Our technology is now reliable enough for its first commercial applications, which we believe will deliver the promise of same-day results to researchers everywhere, with DNA synthesis that can be completed in just a few hours.”
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Dear Hollywood, here are 5 female founders to showcase instead of Elizabeth Holmes
Joseph Flaherty
Contributor
Contributor
Joe Flaherty is director of Content & Community at Founder Collective.
There’s a seemingly insatiable demand for Theranos content. John Carreyrou’s best-selling book, “Bad Blood,” has already inspired an HBO documentary, The Inventor; an ABC podcast called The Dropout, a prestige limited series starring SNL’s Kate McKinnon, was just announced; and Jennifer Lawrence is reportedly going to star in the feature film version of this tawdry “true crime meets tech” tale. That’s before getting started on the various and sundry cover stories and think pieces about her fraud.
I think it’s fair to say the Theranos story has been sufficiently well-documented, and I’m worried that this negative perception may be reinforced now that uBiome founder Jessica Richman has been placed on administrative leave. While it’s hard to pass on a chance to stoke startup schadenfreude, perhaps we could focus less on these rare, unrepresentative and dispiriting examples? Instead, Hollywood could put the spotlight on women who pioneered the bleeding edge of tech and actually produced billion-dollar successes. Here are a few candidates ready for their close-ups:
Judith Faulkner, founder and chief executive officer, Epic Systems
Judith Faulkner – Founder/CEO, Epic Systems
In the late 1970s, the picture of a working woman in Wisconsin was likely Laverne or Shirley. Little did anyone know that in the basement of a Victorian manse in Madison, the future of healthcare was being coded by Judith Faulkner, the founder and CEO of what would become Epic Systems. Epic is arguably the most impactful startup in the history of health software, and Faulkner was building medical scheduling software before most people could even picture a PC. Her efforts established the Electronic Medical Records market as we know it and today. Her company manages records for more than 200 million people, employs nearly 10,000 and generates around $2.7 billion per year in revenue — not bad for a math graduate who never raised any venture capital.
One might argue that the origins of medical software are too tepid to make for exciting TV, but something tells me the kind of CEO who hires Disney alums to design her corporate campus and dresses up like a wizard to address her employees might make for a compelling subject.
SANTA BARBARA, CA – FEBRUARY 09: Lynda Weinman speaks onstage (Photo by Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images for SBIFF)
Lynda Weinman – Founder/CEO, Lynda.com
Lynda Weinman might have the most esoteric path to becoming a billion-dollar entrepreneur in history. After getting a humanities degree from Evergreen College, where she was classmates with “Simpsons” creator Matt Groenig, Lynda opened a pair of punk rock fashion boutiques on LA’s Sunset Strip.
After those folded in the early 1980s, she taught herself enough computer graphics to become a freelance animator on movies like “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” which in turn led to her becoming a teacher at the prestigious Art Center College of Design. Her academic pedigree provided the launching pad to write an influential textbook; that, in turn, gave her the star power to strike out on her own as one of the first web celebrities.
Keep in mind; this dramatic arc only covers the time before she started the eponymous Lynda.com, and bootstrapped it to a $1.5 billion exit in edtech — an industry most VCs and entrepreneurs fear to tread. In terms of material for a memoir, Hannah Horvath has nothing on Lynda Weinman.
FRAMINGHAM, MA – MAY 30: Shira Goodman, former chief executive at Staples, poses for a portrait in Framingham, MA on May 30, 2017 (Photo by Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Shira Goodman – CEO, Staples.com
Shira Goodman has arguably done more for online shopping in the U.S. than anyone not named Bezos. She didn’t found Staples, but she did start and scale its “delivery business,” as she humbly calls it, to the point where it became the fourth largest e-commerce company in the U.S.
At a time when more nimble startups were disrupting big-box retailers, Shira did what few of her contemporaries could do — rapidly shifted a multi-billion-dollar legacy company in an ancient industry into the future, and eventually became CEO of the entire enterprise. She did this while also raising three children and supporting her husband when he decided to change careers and go to Rabbinical school. Sitcoms have been premised on less, and since two versions of “The Office” have captivated audiences, perhaps it’s time to provide the perspective from the CEO of Dunder-Mifflin HQ?
Helen Greiner, co-founder, iRobot
Helen Greiner – Co-founder, iRobot
From C. A. Rotwang in “Metropolis” to Tony Stark in the Marvel movies, there have been plenty of cinematic explorations of robot builders, but the story of iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner might be more interesting than anything yet committed to celluloid. As a recent grad from MIT, Greiner spent a substantial chunk of the 1990s applying her mechanical genius to everything from a mechatronic dinosaur for Disney to a store cleaning robot with the potential for mass destruction for SC Johnson.
Far from an ivory-tower academic, Grenier helped the government deploy search and rescue efforts at Ground Zero after 9/11 and cave-clearing ‘bots in Afghanistan, and the bomb-disposing Packbot she developed has saved the lives of thousands of service members. Grenier, at age 38, took her company public and made the Jetson’s vision of a robot housekeeper a reality in the form of the Roomba.
CAMBRIDGE, MA – MARCH 15: Kelsey Wirth, who has a grassroots organization called Mothers Out Front: Mobilizing For A Livable Climate (Photo by Essdras M Suarez/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Kelsey Wirth – Co-founder, Align Technologies
While the original startup bros were inflating the tech bubble in the late 1990s, Kelsey Wirth was pioneering 3D printing, which at the time was as fantastical as anything Theranos promised. Wirth’s story as the co-founder of Align Technology is especially compelling in the way it shares some surface similarities with Holmes’ narrative. Prominent skeptics of Invisalign cast doubts on the company in its early days, noting that the startup’s PR had outstripped its clinical validation. Wirth had to solve seemingly intractable technical challenges, including scanning misaligned incisors, developing algorithms to overcome underbites, pioneering new manufacturing process, convincing the FDA to clear the product and then selling it across the country — armed only with an English lit degree and an MBA. Despite the long odds of curing crossbites with software, Wirth started what has become a publicly traded business that is currently worth more than 20 billion dollars.
Most of these founders faced setbacks, including external obstacles and those of their own making. There were layoffs, bad deals and few of these stories had perfectly happy endings. Still, while a contemporary startup can earn plaudits for simply repackaging CBD and pushing it on Facebook, these entrepreneurs demonstrated a level of ambition rarely seen among modern upstarts.
The sensational focus on Elizabeth Holmes’ misdeeds steal focus from a group of landmark female entrepreneurs and waste a tremendous opportunity to inspire the next generation with heroic tales instead of fables of fabrication. None of these accounts have the black and white morality of the Theranos debacle, but these founders cleared hurdles both scientific and social. They flipped the script and made history; surely Hollywood can find some drama in that.
Thanks to Parul Singh, Elizabeth Condon and Alyssa Rosenzweig for reviewing drafts of this post.
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As GE and Amazon move on, Google expands presence in Boston and NYC
NYC and Boston were handed huge setbacks this week when Amazon and GE decided to bail on their commitments to build headquarters in the respective cities on the same day. But it’s worth pointing out that while these large tech organizations were pulling out, Google was expanding in both locations.
Yesterday, upon hearing about Amazon’s decision to scrap its HQ2 plans in Long Island City, New York City Mayor de Blasio had this to say: “Instead of working with the community, Amazon threw away that opportunity. We have the best talent in the world and every day we are growing a stronger and fairer economy for everyone. If Amazon can’t recognize what that’s worth, its competitors will.” One of them already has. Google had already announced a billion-dollar expansion in Hudson Square at the end of last year.
In fact, the company is pouring billions into NYC real estate, with plans to double its 7,000-person workforce over the next 10 years. As TechCrunch’s Jon Russell reported, “Our investment in New York is a huge part of our commitment to grow and invest in U.S. facilities, offices and jobs. In fact, we’re growing faster outside the Bay Area than within it, and this year opened new offices and data centers in locations like Detroit, Boulder, Los Angeles, Tennessee and Alabama, wrote Google CFO Ruth Porat.”
Just this week, as GE was making its announcement, Google was announcing a major expansion in Cambridge, the city across the river from Boston that is home to Harvard and MIT. Kendall Square is also home to offices from Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Akamai, DigitalOcean and a plethora of startups.
Google will be moving into a brand new building that currently is home to the MIT Coop bookstore. It plans to grab 365,000 square feet of the new building when it’s completed, and, as in NYC, will be adding hundreds of new jobs to the 1,500 already in place. Brian Cusack, Google Cambridge Site lead points out the company began operations in Cambridge back in 2003 and has been working on Search, Android, Cloud, YouTube, Google Play, Research, Ads and more.
“This new space will provide room for future growth and further cements our commitment to the Cambridge community. We’re proud to call this city home and will continue to support its vibrant nonprofit and growing business community,” he said in a statement.
As we learned this week, big company commitments can vanish just as quickly as they are announced, but for now at least, it appears that Google is serious about its commitment to New York and Boston and will be expanding office space and employment to the tune of thousands of jobs over the next decade.
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What3words breaks the world down into phrases
If you’re down in ///joins.slides.predict you may want to visit ///history.writing.closets, or if you’ve got a little money to spend, try the Bananas Foster at ///cattle.excuse.luggage. Either way, don’t forget to stop by ///plotting.nest.reshape before you fly out.
If things go what3words’ way, that’s how you’ll be sending out addresses in the future. Founded by musician Chris Sheldrick and Cambridge mathematician Mohan Ganesalingam, the company has cut the world into three meter boxes that are identified by three words. Totonno’s Pizzeria in Brooklyn is at ///cats.lots.dame, while the White House is at ///kicks.mirror.tops. Because there are only three words, you can easily find spots that have no addresses and without using cumbersome latitude and longitude coordinates.
The team created this system after finding that travelers found it almost impossible to find some out-of-the-way places. Tokyo, for example, is notoriously difficult to traverse via address, while other situations — renting a Yurt in Alaska, for example — require constantly updated addresses that do not lend themselves to GPS coordinates. Instead, you can tell your driver to take you to ///else.impulse.broom and be done with it.
The team has raised £40 million and is currently working on systems to add their mapping API to industrial and travel partners. You can browse the map here.
“I organized live music events around the world. Often in rural places. HeIfound equipment, musicians and guests got lost. We tried to give coordinates but they were impossible to remember and communicate accurately,” said Sheldrick. “This is the only address solution designed for voice, and the only system using words and not alphanumeric codes.”
Obviously this will take some getting used to. The three words might get mispronounced, leading to some fun problems, but in general it might be a good to way to get around the world in a post-modern way. After all, some of the spot names sound like poetry, and if you don’t like it you can always just go to ///drills.dandelions.bounds.
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uBiome is jumping into therapeutics with a healthy $83 million in Series C financing
23andMe, IBM and now uBiome is the next tech company to jump into the lucrative multi-billion dollar drug discovery market.
The company started out with a consumer gut health test to check whether your intestines carry the right kind of bacteria for healthy digestion but has since expanded to include over 250,000 samples for everything from the microbes on your skin to vaginal health — the largest data set in the world for these types of samples, according to the company.
Founder Jessica Richman now says there’s a wider opportunity to use this data to create value in therapeutics.
To support its new drug discovery efforts, the San Francisco-based startup will be moving its therapeutics unit into new Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters and appointing former Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez to the board of directors as well.
The company has a healthy pile of cash to help build out that new HQ, too, with a fresh $83 million Series C, lead by OS Fund and in participation with 8VC, Y Combinator, Dentsu Ventures and others.
The drug discovery market is slated to be worth nearly $86 billion by 2022, according to BCC Research numbers. New technologies — those that solve logistics issues and shorten the time between research and getting a drug to market in particular — are driving the growth and that’s where uBiome thinks it can get into the game.
“This financing allows us to expand our product portfolio, increase our focus on patent assets and further raise our clinical profile, especially as we begin to focus on commercialization of drug discovery and development of our patent assets,” Richman said.
Though its unclear at this time which drug maker the company might partner up with, Richman did say there would be plenty to announce later on that front.
So far, the company has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers on microbiome research, has entered into research partnerships with the likes of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and leading research institutions such as Harvard, MIT and Stanford and has previously raised $22 million in funding. The additional VC cash puts the total amount raised to $105 million to date.
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