Genialis, a leading provider of cloud software for the visual exploration of next generation sequencing data, recently closed a $2.3M Seed round. The financing will accelerate the team's expansion in the U.S. and commercialization of Genialis Platform.

Redalpine Venture Capital in Zurich and First Star Venture Capital in Boston co-led the round, joined by Slovenian firm Pikas d.o.o. Several expert angel investors filled out the group. Drew Volpe of First Star explained, "We're very impressed by the Genialis team; they combine deep expertise in computer science and biology along with a strong, customer-driven product sense that's very rare in this space. It's reflected their passionate following by researchers who use their platform to do real science everyday."

The company's vision is for all data stakeholders, from the experimenter at the wet bench to the data scientist in the dry lab, to feel ownership over the discovery process and to contribute their expertise. Researchers should be able to analyze their data more autonomously, and at the same time, collaborate more efficiently and freely. Christopher Mason, Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine and scientific advisor to Genialis, noted, "Scientists often are visual thinkers, and they're inquisitive, and wonderfully impatient to dive right into their data. Genialis' technology does a great job of visualizing volumes of information in a dynamic, intuitive way, eliminating a key barrier for many biologists interpreting their sequencing results and related data."

This fall, Genialis began rolling out its SaaS product lineup, anchored by the flagship Expressions suite for dynamic RNA-seq exploration. With Swift Biosciences, an NGS-library kit company, Genialis also launched a tailored application for variant discovery by targeted genome sequencing. Genialis' fluid design speaks to non-computational scientists, catering to researchers' natural curiosity. "Our goal is to provide every life scientist the best possible experience with their data, so they can ask and answer whatever questions come to mind," said Škoberne.

But beneath the interface and interactivity is a powerful dataflow engine that relies on smart systems to provide bioinformatics decision support, curate and manage data, and streamline the visual experience. Genialis' system aims to learn how users prefer to interact with their data, and to optimize the analysis and user experience based on user-generated content and the opus of data in the public sphere.

Early access users on the Expressions and variant discovery apps include researchers from Harvard University, CPMCRI, Johns Hopkins and Jackson Labs. Genialis also continues to deliver its comprehensive Platform for enterprise customers in need of combined workflows and additional bioinformatics, data management and dissemination tools. Baylor College of Medicine announced such a partnership in October, which includes collaboration with investigators like Drs. Brendan Lee, Peggy Goodell, Gad Shaulsky and Charles Lin. CEO Škoberne declared, "We look forward to serving as a knowledge hub for these top scientists and their fields of study."

About Genialis

Genialis, Inc. is a life sciences data software company based in Houston, Texas, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ljubljana, Slovenia. Genialis focuses on delivering a best-in-class user experience for biologists, while ensuring robust and reproducible data analysis at scale.

Genialis is a pioneer in biological visual analytics software and makes the "absurdly easy to use" platform that biologists love. Researchers on four continents rely on its software to drive discovery, include scientists from top research institutes such as Baylor College of Medicine and cutting-edge industry R&D teams like Swift Biosciences and Diagenode.