Home MedTech & BioTech 23andMe raises US$ 82.5M in Series F funding

23andMe raises US$ 82.5M in Series F funding

American Startup

23andMe raises US$ 82.5M in Series F funding
23andMe raises US$ 82.5M in Series F funding
Sunnyvale, California-based biotechnology company 23andMe has raised around US$ 82.5M in a Series F funding round held in December 2020, from Sequoia Capital and NewView Capital. The latest round brings the total raised by the company to date to over US$ 850M.
The company will use proceeds from the funding round to fund and scale the business.

Founded in 2006 by Anne Wojcicki, Linda Avey and Paul Cusenza, 23andMe is mainly a DNA testing technology company that distributes individual home genetic testing kits, helping customers understand their potential health and ancestry, genealogy and inherited traits. The company mainly aims to provide insights to customers about their health and more knowledge about their lineage and family tree. It has also pivoted its focus to conducting research based on the data it has collected in total. This data is used both for its studies counting a recent one that surveyed how genetic markers could affect a person’s vulnerability to COVID-19 and for use in backing third parties’ work while emphasizing that data is only shared in aggregate de-identified formats for those purposes.

Customers pay $99 to buy a saliva testing kit, which they then use to give a saliva sample that’s sent back to 23andme. After the lab receives the sample, the DNA is extracted from the saliva and amplified so that there is enough in it to be genotyped. The DNA is then cut into small bits, and placed on a glass microarray chip with many microscopic beads applied to its surface. Each bead has a gene probe that matches the DNA of one of the many alternates the company test for. Suppose the sample has a match in the microarray. In that case, the sequences will bind together, allowing researchers to know that this variant is present in the customer’s genome by a fluorescent tag located on the probes. These matches are then gathered into a report sent to the customer, enabling them to know if the variants related to particular diseases, such as Parkinson’s, celiac and Alzheimer’s, are present in their genome.

In an agreement along with funding declared in 2018, the company signed a four-year development contract with GlaxoSmithKline plc to use its genetic data to develop new drugs. During that deal, 23andMe claims to have tested about 5 million people and coming back to the present day; it is said to have tested more than 12 million people.

The recent funding comes almost five years after the company raised US$ 115M in a Series E round from New Enterprise Associates, GV, MPM Capital, Casdin Capital, EquityZen, Illumina Ventures, WuXi Healthcare Ventures and Xfund.

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Aishwarya writes about the startup ecosystem on VCBay. She is a third-year Computer Science engineering student who looks forward to exploring the world of startups and finance.

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