The news: Single cell analysis startup Ozette Technologies, with deep roots in the Seattle academic and startup community, has raised $26 million. The company’s tools enable its academic and biopharma partners to pinpoint and quantify immune cell types from massive datasets. The tools support clinical trials and other research.
The background: Ozette spun out of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in 2020; was incubated at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2); and fueled by a $6 million seed funding round led last year by Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group. Madrona also led the new, Series A funding round; participants include Cercano Management (formerly Vulcan Capital) and M12, Microsoft’s venture fund.
The people: The startup’s tech has its origins in the Fred Hutch labs of co-founders Raphael Gottardo, now at Lausanne University, and Greg Finak, now Ozette’s chief technology officer. Other co-founders are Evan Greene, a former Fred Hutch data scientist who is now with Ozette, and CEO Ali Ansary, an attending physician at Fred Hutch and UW Medicine who served a stint at the AI2 as an entrepreneur in residence. The company has more than 25 scientists, engineers and designers with previous experience at Genentech, Google, Microsoft and Amazon.
The tech: Advances in biomedical techniques enable researchers to examine up to 40 different proteins on the surface of cells simultaneously. But data analysis techniques have not kept up. Over the last decade Fred Hutch researchers have built up software to do this; their open-source tools have been downloaded more than 4.5 million times from 100,000 unique IP addresses, said Ansary.
