Creathor Venture announced today that it is leading a financing round for Helsinki, Finland-based Blueprint Genetics. The company is a global provider of clinical genetic testing for the diagnosis of inherited diseases, leveraging a proprietary AI-enabled sequencing and interpretation platform. The company will receive a total of up to € 14 million from an international syndicate of investors. The financing round is led by new investors Creathor Venture and MedTech Innovation Partners (MTIP), while existing investors Inventure, Pontos Group and Stanford University participate as well.
As a result, the total funding for Blueprint Genetics will be €23M. They received € 2M in September 2014, plus additional €6M in several tranches from our existing investors, who include Pontos, Inventure and Avohoidon Tutkimussäätiö during 2015 and 2016.
The new funding will enable Blueprint Genetics to expand their footprint in both existing and new markets, and allowed the company to invest in clinical interpretation capabilities, artificial intelligence initiatives and technology platform overall.
Tommi Lehtonen, CEO of Blueprint Genetics stated: “We were pleased to see the high level of interest by our existing as well as top-tier new investors in participating in this financing round. These funds will enable us to move our sequencing technology and our clinical data interpretation platform to the next level in terms of services provided, efficiency and level of automation. Our vision is to bring the use of genetic information to mainstream healthcare, and we strongly believe that cost efficiency combined with uncompromised, high quality is the key to achieve this goal. The ability to automate and improve clinical interpretation processes with software will change the industry and with our unique set-up we are well positioned to be forerunners in this realm.”
Blueprint covers the entire workflow from patient sample to automated clinical interpretation of the results provided in a ready-to-use report, using CLINT, its own artificial intelligence platform, together with its proprietary targeted sequencing technology, OS-Seq, developed at Stanford. Already today, Blueprint Genetics is one of the leading providers of clinical genetic testing with a portfolio of clinical-grade next generation sequencing (NGS) panels covering more than 2,200 disorders in 14 medical specialties such as cardiology, ophthalmology, hematology, neurology and immunology. The unique combination of genetic testing and analysis allows the company to gather variant data and link it to phenotype details, further building the already large underlying genetic database for high quality results interpretation. Blueprint today already works with more than 450 hospital customers in over 40 countries.
“We are very impressed with the potential of Blueprint Genetics, a company that already is a top European provider in one of the fastest growing fields in healthcare. We at Creathor believe in supporting extraordinary ideas in technology and the life sciences as well as the intersection of these sectors. Blueprint’s combination of state-of-the-art DNA sequence analysis with automated IT-based data interpretation perfectly fits with our investment strategy. That is why we have chosen Blueprint Genetics as an investment for our new fund. We are very much looking forward to working with Blueprint’s highly committed and experienced management team and to supporting the company in its next phase of development.” commented Dr. Christian Weiss, Partner at Creathor.
