According to Techcrunch, the round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Founders Fund, Data Collective, and Third Kind Venture Capital. The deal is a bit of a coup, coming as it does from Andreessen Horowitz's months-old, $200 million Bio Fund. The vehicle, led by longtime Stanford professor Vijay Pande, has now made a handful of investments (almost all undisclosed). But its stamp of approval for Freenome is meaningful given the number of liquid biopsy companies that Pande is seeing and not funding.

The technology is 'very hot,' says Pande. The reason why, he explains, is that beyond the first challenge of catching cancer with liquid biopsies instead of by extracting tissue (which entrepreneurs are solving), and beyond the second challenge of detecting cancer from DNA (which is also being done), the biggest challenge in medical testing today is pinpointing exactly where a cancer is growing and how serious a threat it is. He calls it part of the 'holy grail.'

The 'cure to cancer isn't going to look like another drug,' says Pande. 'It will be our ability to predict that someone has cancer far before traditional means, then giving [those diagnosed with the disease] existing drugs. At least 80 percent or more of cancers could be treated successfully if only they were caught ahead of time.'

Apparently, Freenome has come the closest that Pande has seen to striking on the right understanding of both computer science and biology to detect the mutations that make it possible to diagnose particular cancers -- and determine the best course of treatment for them based on their composition.

Freenome cofounder and CEO Gabe Otte says the 'big differentiator here is that our technology allows us to answer these additional questions because we're looking at different biologies. Other companies are capturing a small fraction of DNA fragments to determine: cancer or not cancer. . . But we realized early on that if there was going to be a successful biopsy test that could also impact treatment, we need to answer many more questions. We wanted to answer not just cancer or not cancer, but malignant or benign, and where the tissue is. So we capture all the [genetic material floating in our blood] rather than fixating on a few mutations known to be associated with cancer.'

Otte admits that while the young company has validated its tests with hundreds of samples, and that it's 'likely to work on thousands and tens of thousands of samples,' what Freenome didn't want to do is 'blow $100 million' in venture capital on its platform before its technology is proven beyond a doubt. (Presumably, that '$100 million' number is a reference to companies like Guardant Health that have raised big-league rounds in recent years. Guardant makes a non-invasive genomic sequencing test for cancer.)