Microbiome startup Sequentia Biotech heralds “new era” in omics with €10 million round
Sequentia will use the round winnings to speed up the market introduction of its cloud-based and microbiome-focused healthcare software MICK and scale up the development of its technology offerings.
The round was led by Seventure Partners, a French venture capital firm with a history of backing microbiome-focused companies developing disease treatments including Microbiotica and MaaT Pharma. The venture investment arm of the European Innovation Council (EIC), the EIC Fund, also participated in the round.
“We believe we are on the brink of a new era in omics research,” said Riccardo Aiese Cigliano, scientific director and co-founder at Sequentia Biotech in a public statement, adding that the company’s approach is geared to disrupt the status quo. “Our MICK platform offers a major step forward across multiple health applications, from precision nutrition and wellness, to understanding biological processes and diseases, to creating microbiome-based treatments and therapies.”
Omics involve identifying the biological makeup of an organism by reading its genome (genomics), transcriptome (transcriptomics), microbiome (microbiomics), and more. The information produced by these techniques can be used in diagnostics to guide treatments, such as the genetic basis of inherited diseases and personalized treatments for cancer.
Sequentia was launched in 2013 and has helped clients around the world including top research institutions, hospitals and public authorities. Its MICK platform is designed to help medical professionals to harness microbiome data to make healthcare more effective. For example, it automatically identifies microorganisms in a sample, highlights potential pathogens and monitors how a patient’s microbiome changes over time.
Sequentia’s other cloud software products include GINO, an assistant to automate the analysis of genomic data; GAIA, which helps users to process metagenomic data to find out what microbial species are in a sample; and AIR, which lets users carry out transcriptomic analyses.
The global market for multiomics was valued at $2.35 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow by more than 15% per year to $6.38 billion by 2030. The growth was spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and also benefits from growing traction of the technology in precision medicine and pharmaceutical development.
Other startups gunning to cash in on the omics growth in healthcare include the U.S. firm Pleno, which raised $40 million in a Series A round in 2022, and compatriot company Stellaromics, which raised $25 million in a Series A round to propel its spatial multi-omics technology last year.
Sequentia is also developing omics techniques to help clients in verticals outside of healthcare including agriculture, food and biofuels. For example, omics can guide users how to protect crops from pathogens and to stimulate the growth of the plants. It can also be deployed in food testing for contamination and geographical tracing.
