Elucidata Corporation, an India- and US-based data science startup, has raised $1.7 million in seed funding led by Hyperplane Venture Capital, the company said in a statement.
The financing round also saw participation from several angel investors. Elucidata has been bootstrapped so far and has already achieved profitability, it said.
Elucidata was founded in 2015 by IIT Mumbai graduate Abhishek Jha and IIT Delhi alumnus Swetabh Pathak. The Delhi- and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company is focused on developing tools and software solutions for drug discovery.
The company plans to use the seed funding to expand its Cambridge team, add to its operations in New Delhi and launch new software-aided discovery tools.
“The way biological data is used to drive discovery in the industry is often slow and cumbersome. We look to address the needs of the scientists who are discovering new life-saving drugs,” said Jha, who previously worked at Agios Pharmaceuticals.
Vivjan Myrto, managing partner at Boston, Massachusetts-based Hyperplane, said there is vast potential for Elucidata’s platform to improve research on medicines.
The company said its cloud-based data analytics platform Polly allows rapid data turnaround and analysis. The product, released this year, can adapt to many types of data workflows and features an array of applications that can process, analyse, integrate and visualize biological data across metabolomics, genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics.
“While data generation has been modernised, data analysis for drug discovery is lagging. We aim to bridge this gap and impact human lives in profound ways,” Jha added.
Elucidata’s data-driven drug discovery platform is at the intersection of computational biology, software engineering, machine learning, statistics and design, the company said.
“Polly lets you fail or iterate on experiments faster and allows for cooperative, real-time collaboration, which makes drug discovery more effective,” said Pathak.
Over the past three years, Elucidata has partnered with 15 biotech and pharmaceutical companies to streamline their drug discovery process, the company said. In the last month alone, 1,000 datasets were uploaded to Polly by scientists across the world, it added.