Houston health technology firm CellChorus has its eyes on growth after receiving backing from Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator.
A major trend in life sciences of the past few decades has been the move from bulk-cell analysis to single-cell analysis, said Dan Meyer, CEO of CellChorus. The company's technology uses artificial intelligence to pair comprehensive analyses of single cells with live cell imaging.
"Every cell is different, so it's not sufficient to evaluate an individual cell, and it's not sufficient to evaluate a large number of cells all together," Meyer said. "We have to be able to evaluate a large number of cells on a cell-by-cell basis."
Meyer was previously COO and a board director at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based cloud software company Genospace, which was acquired by Sarah Cannon, the global cancer institute for HCA, in 2017.
CellChorus' chief scientific officer, Navin Varadarajan, is the M.D. Anderson Professor of Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering at the University of Houston, where he also leads the university's Single Cell Lab. CellChorus completed its spin out of the University of Houston earlier this year.
Currently, CellChorus is in the midst of the summer batch of the Y Combinator accelerator program, which will conclude next month. Through its participation in the accelerator, CellChorus received an investment of $125,000 as well as connections to a wealth of potential customers, Meyer said. Earlier this year, CellChorus was awarded a $50,000 investment prize from Houston-based venture capital group Texas Halo Fund during the Venture Houston pitch competition.
"This year, we completed our first round of funding," Meyer said. "I expect we will launch, if not complete, our next round of funding by the end of the year."
Meyer is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where CellChorus has an office location. The company plans to open a new commercial lab next month at the UH Technology Bridge, adjacent to the UH campus, Meyer said. With four employees currently, CellChorus plans to double its headcount by the end of the year.
CellChorus made a conscious decision to headquarter the company in Houston, as opposed to San Francisco, for a few different reasons, Meyer said. The startup wanted to be near Varadarajan's research at UH. Having a nearness to the Texas Medical Center was another big factor — many CellChorus customers run or plan to run clinical trials with research institutions in the Houston area.
