Israeli computing research SaaS company Code Ocean announced last Wednesday the completion of a $16.5 million Series B funding round to expand its digital lab platform.
The round was co-led by investment firms Battery Ventures and Microsoft’s M12 venture capital fund.
This latest capital has allowed the company to open up the hiring of people with skills and experience in engineering, science, marketing and sales.
Founded in 2016, Code Ocean has developed a digital lab that provides IT professionals with a secure space to automate, replicate, share and research across a wide range of scientific disciplines in the client’s private cloud. The platform has benefited researchers working in biology, biopharmaceuticals, chemistry, genomics and emerging areas of computer science, such as AI-driven drug R&D.
The system runs on CPUs or GPUs, allowing users to run code published in academic journals and conferences, access published software code and data from scientific journals such as Nature, IEEE, and Elsevier to view and download for free, and run published code without having to install anything on their personal computer.
Code Ocean’s platform is powered by its Compute Capsule, a new type of container technology that houses a user’s code and everything the code needs to run, including all supporting data and a specification of the computing environment – the specific versions of the operating system, packages and libraries, among others, on which the code depends. The Compute Capsule is built on the concept of open science, making it easy to migrate code and data between platforms, and it helps preserve the full function of a computing experiment for years of future research. later.
Biopharmaceutical companies such as Sema4, Lantern, Champions Oncology, CytoReason, and Dragonfly Therapeutics, among others, have reduced the cost of their computational research using Code Ocean’s digital laboratory platform.
“A consistent, automated virtual lab is absolutely essential in today’s digital age of science,” said Simon Adar, co-founder and CEO of Code Ocean. “Computing has given us vastly increased speed and, simultaneously, vastly increased complexity. To advance computer science at a faster rate, access to high performance computing for scientists must be simplified to maximize collaboration secure and transparent and accelerate discoveries to market.Our platform solves the barrier of complexity by providing a digital laboratory that allows the scientist to focus on science.With greater scientific productivity, advances in healthcare , including the rapid development of personalized medicine, we will ultimately deliver better healthcare outcomes in the years to come. the center of scientific knowledge that can be shared between disciplines.
“Our scientists, researchers and data engineers needed a world-class environment to create reproducible science in a highly secure and collaborative environment,” said Panna Sharma, President and CEO of Lantern Pharma. “Code Ocean’s digital lab has been an ideal environment for our scientists and engineers to design and scale our proprietary AI for drug discovery, as it allows them to develop, document and share ideas faster and more efficiently. .”
