Finland-based Blueprint Genetics today announced the closure of a huge funding round led by the German VC firm Creathor Venture. Founded in 2012, Blueprint Genetics is an internationally successful provider of clinical genetic testing for the diagnosis of inherited diseases, leveraging a proprietary AI-enabled sequencing and interpretation platform. The startup will receive a total of up to € 14 million from an international syndicate of investors including Creathor Venture, MedTech Innovation Partners (MTIP), Inventure and Pontos Group.
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 artificial intelligence platform, together with its proprietary targeted sequencing technology, OS-Seq, developed at Stanford.
Blueprint Genetics is already one of the leading providers of clinical genetic testing with a portfolio of clinicalgrade 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.
An estimated 350 million people globally are affected by severe inherited diseases. Sequence analysis is considered a standard approach for the identification and clinical diagnosis of the genetic cause of inherited disorders. Market experts estimate the overall genetic screening market will grow by more than 30% annually to a double-digit billion-dollar market in the next years.
Tommi Lehtonen, CEO of Blueprint Genetics stated: “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 Genetics will use the fresh capital from this financing round to fuel further growth, strengthen sales, expand its geographic footprint and establish programs to further increase the efficiency of its sequencing platform and continue the development of its software component and data pool to make interpretation of genetic data more efficient.
