There’s action in London, Cambridge and further afield with Nasuni Corporation and Sano Genetics securing tech funding.
Nasuni, a file data services firm, has announced a $60 million (£46 million) equity investment by new investor Sixth Street Growth, the investing platform of investment firm Sixth Street, which will also be joining Nasuni’s board.
Sano Genetics, co-founded by three University of Cambridge genomics postgraduates, has raised $11 million (£8.4 million) in a Series A funding round led by MMC Ventures, with further funding from Episode 1, Seedcamp and several angel investors.
Nice Days for Nasuni
Nasuni is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, with offices in North Carolina and London.
The company provides cloud file services and sees itself as a cloud replacement for traditional network attached storage (NAS) and file server silos. It provides services in over 70 countries.
This is the fourth round of financing Nasuni has raised over the last five years, in which it has raised a total of $148 million (£113 million). With this financing, Nasuni now has approximately $100 million (£76 million) in cash on its balance sheet. The new investment will be used for international expansion and potential acquisitions.
Paul Flanagan, Chief Executive Officer, Nasuni, comments: “Cybersecurity threats such as ransomware are forcing businesses to think differently about their data infrastructure.”
The tech firm is aiming to tap into enterprises’ desires for cloud solutions to strengthen cyber resilience and support hybrid work models. Nasuni cites IDC, which forecasts cloud file services adoption will reach a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40% and be a $14 billion (£10.7 billion) market by 2025.
The funding comes as Nasuni reported “record-breaking” results from its fiscal year ending 31 December 2021.
Analysis of Sano Genetics
Sano Genetics has developed a software platform that connects patients living with rare and chronic conditions, such as Long Covid, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, directly with biotech and pharma companies leading personalised medicine research. It reckons this market was worth $52.4 billion (£40 billion) in 2020 and is predicted to reach $112.8 billion (£86.2 billion) by 2027.
It also offers its biotech and pharma clients the ability to power branded portals for participant recruitment and engagement.
Dr Patrick Short, CEO and Co-Founder of Sano Genetics, states: “It still takes ten to 15 years for new drugs to reach patients, and many will never make it out of R&D because costs are prohibitive. This funding injection takes us closer to our mission to build the platform that we, and many others – patients and researchers – wish was available a decade ago.”
Sano Genetics raised £500,000 in pre-seed funding in 2018, and £2.5 million in seed funding in 2020. Its customers include precision medicine developers BenevolentAI, ESCAPE Bio, and “population-scale” biobanks such as the NIHR BioResource.
The company explains that it has doubled its revenue every six months since inception (in 2016, according to LinkedIn) and forged partnerships with genetic biobanks in the UK and Australia, as well as patient groups.
The tech firm will use this latest round of funding to grow its team in the US and Europe, and develop its platform to target 50+ diseases and over six countries by mid 2023.
