Curoverse announced today the company has raised $1.5 million to accelerate development of the Arvados free and open source software platform for genomic and biomedical big data and to deliver new products based on the platform.

Arvados is a computational storage platform designed for the biomedical industry. The first deployment of Arvados runs a private cloud with 300 TB of storage and 500 cores that is used for genomic analysis at the Harvard Personal Genome Project and for research work at Harvard Medical School.

'Responding to explosive growth in genomic and biomedical data, research and clinical labs are turning to technologies that have made web-scale computing possible, but existing solutions are failing to address the complex needs of the biomedical industry,' said Adam Berrey, chief executive officer of Curoverse. 'We are enabling a new generation of bioinformatics computing systems with a complete stack of commercially-supported, community-driven, open-source technologies that apply elastic computing and big-data strategies to the unique requirements of genomic research and precision medicine.'

Arvados was originally developed by a team of scientists and software engineers led by Alexander Wait Zaranek, Ph.D. in the Church lab at Harvard Medical School. The platform includes a content addressable distributed storage system and a computational management system designed to make complex analyses easily reproducible.

'Translating the innovations in genomic sequencing into meaningful medical care will require transparent informatics resources that combine open source software and public domain datasets,' said Dr. George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. 'The Arvados software and the data collected through Personal Genome Projects can be a foundation for the development and delivery of precision medicine in cancer, neo-natal care, inherited diseases, pharmacogenomics, and a variety of other applications.'

The series seed financing round included investments from Hatteras Venture Partners, Point Judith Ventures, Common Angels, MassVentures, and Boston Global Ventures.

'For the last several years we have closely followed the market for bioinformatics platforms that address new challenges created by next-generation sequencing and biomedical big data,' said Clay Thorp, general partner at Hatteras Venture Partners. 'Curoverse has a clear strategy to use open source technology with a unique go-to-market model that is well-aligned with the needs of research and clinical customers.'

Curoverse is available today through a private beta program. The company plans to release their first commercial products in 2014. The Arvados software is available at http://arvados.org.

About Curoverse

Curoverse is a venture-backed startup developing computational storage infrastructure for a new era of precision medicine driven by genomic and biomedical big data. Based in Boston, Curoverse is a major contributor to the Arvados free and open source software project. Curoverse was formerly known as Clinical Future, Inc. More information is available about the company at http://curoverse.com.