Riga-based startup Longenesis announces a late seed round of around €1 million, backed by a group of business angels led by Rustam Gilfanov. The round was also joined by Ilya Suharenko, a private investor and one of the Managing Partners of LongeVC, bringing in 17 years of experience in traditional banking. Longenesis is co-founded by Insilico Medicine and other top-tier biotech players.
Founded in 2017, Longenesis is empowering biomedical research without borders. Its main aim? To help identify and unlock the hidden value of biomedical data to accelerate the novel drug and treatment discovery and provide better help to those in need.
Medical data is sensitive and confidential, creating obstacles for researchers needing large and detailed datasets. By introducing digitalization and consent-enabled showcasing of biomedical assets, as well as putting the emphasis on patient-centricity, Longenesis will help to reduce recruitment costs and accelerate biomedical research.
The funds raised in this late seed round will allow Longenesis to expand in its key markets and scale the deployment of its 3 core products: Longenesis Curator, Longenesis Themis, Longenesis Engage.
The company also recently announced a partnership with Medtronic, a €140 billion ($167 billion) company manufacturing medical devices. The Medtronic-Longenesis partnership, also involving diabetic patient organizations, will be a pilot on the digitalization of patient engagement into research and advocacy initiatives.
“Advocacy is an integral part of the patient organization’s work, however, up until now it has also been a huge struggle. To ensure that patient needs and wishes are taken seriously, and their best interests are put first, we need to engage them in an ongoing dialogue. Many factors hinder this process, a few of which are their varying capabilities as well as distrust that comes with any chronic condition. For this reason, we are excited to partner up with Longenesis. We believe that their patient engagement and data curation solutions will give us the necessary access not only to diabetic patients but also to research partners that might benefit their needs. We hope that the ongoing project is just the start,” said Indra Stelmane, Endocrinologist, Ph.D., and president of Latvian Diabetes Federation.
A driving force behind Longenesis is LongeVC. LongeVC is a service and investment fund to support biotech startups with a focus on industrial development, fundraising, and startup development. The main focus of LongeVC is selecting companies in groundbreaking technological areas of the longevity industry. Garri Zmudze, the Managing Partner of LongeVC, noted: “Compliant access to clinical data and patient cohorts will remain the fundamental success factor for any biotech or longevity-focused venture. We believe that Longenesis has all it takes to become a backbone of compliant biomedical data utilization in the coming years.”
Rustam Gilfanov, a business angel and a venture partner of the LongeVC investment fund, who led the investment round, commented on the role of digitalization in biotechnology and medical research: “Biotechnology is developing rapidly today, moving towards digitalizing and once fully human-dependent and overly manual processes. Recent successes in AI-driven drug discovery serve as a great example of this with many more to come. Digitalization, transparency, and compliance in biomedical data asset access are key for such innovations to be repeatable and scaleable. The fund strives to develop such startups. This is our future.”
Longenesis’s team has experience working with biomedical organizations and unlocking the potential for accelerating the R&D process around the globe, including National level projects in the Middle East, US, EU, and APAC regions. Longenesis also recently took home the main prize at the TechChill 2021 startup competition, winning 10K.
