US-based life science company Deepcell has secured $73m in a Series B round led by venture capital firm Koch Disruptive Technologies.
The funding will enable the company to expand the team, accelerate the development and commercial launch of its AI-powered single-cell morphology analysis.
It brings Deepcell’s overall funding to nearly $100m since the company was established in 2017.
The platform uses advanced AI, proprietary microfluidics, high-resolution optics, and cell atlas with more than one billion images to analyse and sort cells based on visual features, offering researchers new insights to study single cells at high resolution which were not accessible with other “omics” based tools.
The Series B funding round saw participation from the new investors including Bridger Healthcare, Horizons Ventures, Casdin Capital and lead investors from previous rounds, Andreessen Horowitz and Bow Capital as well as Google Brain head Jeff Dean, and Madrona Venture Group managing director Matt Mcllwain.
Deepcell CEO and co-founder Maddison Masaeli said: “The new funding will help us to accelerate our growth, develop our platform, and take a major step toward full commercialisation.
“The support we are receiving highlights the potential of Deepcell’s AI-powered single-cell morphology analysis, and enables us to expand the team, transition to late-stage development and accelerate towards introducing our platform to a present and growing list of potential customers.”
Deepcell claims that its platform is different from other cell analysis approaches as it isolates and collects label-free single cells by keeping the cell intact which is important for downstream biological characterisation.
With its technology, the company aims to add a new dimension in cell biology with the ability to study cellular heterogeneity easily.
Deepcell CTO and co-founder Mahyar Salek said: “Deepcell is advancing the use of computational methods with our deep learning capabilities to help fulfil the promise of precision medicine.
“AI can learn to identify cells based on visual differences that are hardly accessible to the human eye and can continually improve, thanks to our capability to sort cells and thereby elicit ground truth at scale.
“With training on billions of cell images and sorting cells, our AI technology connects morphology to multiomics, delivering unprecedented access to the exciting world of biology.”
Koch Disruptive Technologies managing director and Deepcell new board member David Mauney said: “We are thrilled to support Deepcell’s vision as the market leader in single-cell morpholomics.
“The company has clearly demonstrated the ability to provide unique biological insights previously unattained by existing approaches. We look forward to working with the team to expand their product offering and prepare for full commercialisation.”
Along with Mauney, Blake Goodner and Matt Posard will join the board of directors of Deepcell.
Goodner is a founding member of Bridger Management and advisory board member with The Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, while Posard is a former senior vice president of Emerging Markets at Illumina.
