Biomedical big data is receiving a new platform. Curoverse announced Wednesday the Harvard-spun startup has raised $1.5 million to accelerate the development of Arvados, its open-source computational storage platform currently being used at the Harvard Personal Genome Project and Harvard Medical School.
The seed round was supported by Hatteras Venture Partners, Point Judith Capital, CommonAngels, MassVentures and Boston Global Ventures.
The Boston-based business "built for bioinformatics" was originally developed by a team of scientists and software engineers in Harvard Medical School's George Church Lab, a pioneer of human genome sequencing. Alexander Wait Zaranek led the team and now serves as Curoverse's scientific director, working alongside CEO Adam Berrey, formerly the SVP of marketing and strategy at Brightcove.
Arvados is designed to make complex analyses easily reproducible, as well as sharing between organizations more accessible. The software is now available through a private beta program, as the company readies to release its first commercial products in 2014.
"For the last several years, we have closely followed the market for bioinformatics platforms that address new challenges created by next-generation sequencing and biomedical big data," said Clay Thorp, general partner at Hatteras Venture Partners, in a statement. "Curoverse has a clear strategy to use open-source technology with a unique go-to-market model that is well-aligned with the needs of research and clinical customers."
