DNAnexus Secures $200-Million Funding to Advance its Biomedical Data-Driven Technology Platform for Precision Medicine

DNAnexus, Inc. recently announced a $200-million financing round to accelerate the global adoption of its technology, translating the world’s complex multi-omics and clinical data into tangible insights and personalized treatments. The round was led by funds managed by Blackstone Growth (BXG), with participation from existing investors Northpond Ventures, GV, Perceptive Advisors, Innovatus Capital Partners, and Foresite Capital.

Geneticists predict that by 2025 more than 500 million genomes will have been sequenced, generating 40 exabytes of data. Only a fraction of this data is currently being utilized for drug discovery. Investment in genomics programs has been growing rapidly in pharmaceutical and clinical diagnostic companies driven by an increasing focus on new, innovative drugs and diagnostic tests. DNAnexus provides the technology and products to support this rapidly growing ecosystem and drive critical insights from massive genomic, multi-omic, and clinical datasets.

Today, DNAnexus has more than 12,000 platform users across 48 countries, and counts seven of the top 10 pharmaceutical and eight of the top 10 diagnostics companies as customers. The platform now stores more than 65 petabytes of data, a number that has grown 70% per year since 2015. The company built and continues to support the UK Biobank’s Research Analysis Platform, allowing approved researchers global access to the world’s largest, most comprehensive biomedical database and tools. DNAnexus also exclusively partnered with the FDA to power precisionFDA, a secure, cloud-based, high-performance platform enabling access by FDA researchers and reviewers, as well as sponsors from the private sector, to use the data and tools in a collaborative environment, furthering the standards by which multi-omic data is included in FDA submissions.

“The funding enables us to accelerate our product roadmap to meet the global demand for technologies harnessing the power of biomedical data and driving precision medicine forward,” said Richard Daly, Chief Executive Officer at DNAnexus. “Blackstone has shown a deep commitment to the healthcare, life sciences, and technology industries with a global network and operating resources. Blackstone will be a strong partner as we grow our business and support the new wave of biomedical insights generated by our customers using large-scale clinical, multi-omics data.”

Ram Jagannath, Global Head of Healthcare for Blackstone, said “We have seen a rapid proliferation of healthcare data over the last several years, driven by the advent of new technologies and the surging availability of diagnostic tests. The DNAnexus Platform enables the life sciences industry to derive critical insights from multi-omic, clinical, and phenotypic data to hasten the development and delivery of novel therapeutics, getting them into the hands of patients who need them more quickly and cost-effectively. We’re proud to support the next phase of growth for the company as it continues executing on its mission to improve human healthcare.”

Blackstone Growth’s investment in DNAnexus follows the broader firm’s recent investments in life sciences and pharma IT, including Medable, Precision Medicine Group, Cryoport, and Life Sciences Logistics. Additionally, in 2018, the firm established Blackstone Life Sciences, a private investment platform with capabilities to invest across the life cycle of companies and products within the key life science sectors. The Blackstone Life Sciences team has deep investing and operating expertise in product development and commercialization, and strong relationships with leading pharmaceutical and medical technology companies including AstraZeneca, Novartis, and Pfizer.

Mike Kirkman, Head of Healthcare for Blackstone Growth, added “Blackstone has consistently demonstrated a commitment to backing category-defining companies at the intersection of healthcare and life sciences, and the investment in DNAnexus represents an exciting continuation of that commitment. As a variety of healthcare constituents, including pharma, diagnostics businesses, and the FDA, increasingly leverage multi-omic and clinical data for more accurate detection of disease and the development of precision medicines, we believe DNAnexus will continue to serve as the engine that helps power those important scientific developments and insights. We’re thrilled to leverage our experience and the Blackstone infrastructure to partner with the DNAnexus team in accelerating the company’s growth and amplifying its impact.”

DNAnexus will use the funding to advance its core genomics and multi-omics platform, continue its international growth, and support the integration of new AI and machine learning technologies and tools. The company is focused on allowing more customers to rapidly analyze complex genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and clinical datasets together on a single, secure, and scalable platform to help reveal insights that can accelerate precision medicine.

Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative investment firm. We seek to create positive economic impact and long-term value for our investors, the companies we invest in, and the communities in which we work. We do this by using extraordinary people and flexible capital to help companies solve problems. Our $881 billion in assets under management include investment vehicles focused on private equity, real estate, public debt and equity, infrastructure, life sciences, growth equity, opportunistic, non-investment grade credit, real assets and secondary funds, all on a global basis. For more information,visit www.blackstone.com.

To improve human health, researchers and clinicians need to access complex and sensitive biomedical data and innovative technologies that can enable novel insights. However, these data are often incompatible or difficult to process. DNAnexus is the leading bioinformatics company that facilitates secure access and utilization of biomedical data while supporting collaboration across internal and external teams. From providing an end-to-end integrated diagnostic R&D and production bioinformatics platform that enables national biobank biomedical initiatives to providing pharmaceutical companies with a multi-omics data science platform for new target drug discovery, DNAnexus empowers the healthcare and life sciences industry to transform how they leverage biomedical data to accelerate scientific discoveries and deliver better patient care. For more information, visit www.dnanexus.com.