DENVER– Pluto Biosciences, a biotech software startup and developer of the Pluto collaborative life sciences platform, announced today it has raised $1 million in its seed round, led by private investors. Funding will be used to expand the bioinformatics and machine learning-based analyses in its collaborative life sciences platform, democratize access to published research data, and close the gaps in scientific collaboration to drive new, high-impact discoveries.
“Pluto is defining a new category, offering life sciences organizations a platform for managing even highly complex research projects and experimental data in one place. It’s going to accelerate the speed to scientific discoveries in ways we’ve never seen before,” said Pluto Investor and former Chief Product Officer at Helix, Chris Glodé. “I’ve worked with Rani at previous start-ups and her vision, combined with the team she has built at Pluto, is formidable. I’m proud to support an incredibly important and desperately needed innovation that we believe will change the way scientists collaborate, and use experimental data to drive new insight into critical areas of science, including diseases like COVID-19 and cancer.”
Since its launch in August, Pluto has doubled its staff to drive innovation in the product. For labs with an annual subscription, the team now offers discovery-enhancing features including:
- Life sciences-centric project management — track every lab project and milestone, assign upcoming experiments to lab members, and generate real-time progress reports
- Support for numerous low- and high-throughput assays — upload raw or processed data for experiment types including qPCR, ELISA, imaging or animal behavioral studies, RNA-seq, metabolomics, proteomics, and more
- Fully-customizable, interactive Pluto Experiment pages — researchers can perform bioinformatics analyses, generate publication-ready plots, and share them with collaborators directly from their browser
- Real-time email notifications when new projects or experiments are created or shared
- Fully responsive experience — teams can view results immediately after they’re generated, whether from a desktop computer, mobile device or tablet
- Fine-grained, role-based access controls at the organization, team, project, and individual experiment level allowing secure, configurable viewing and editing access
In addition to the self-service, cloud-based platform, a Pluto subscription gives labs access to Pluto’s Scientific Solutions team, which performs custom bioinformatics analyses and other professional services tailored to customers’ research goals. Paid plans include unlimited user and guest collaborator seats, empowering labs to easily scale projects as they grow. Because Pluto securely stores all raw and processed data, labs do not need their own infrastructure or cloud resources to use Pluto. Data and results stored on Pluto can also be accessed programmatically via API.
“Pluto is breaking the barriers to global scientific collaboration and opening up bioinformatics analysis for labs of all sizes, and we have some truly brilliant minds behind our vision,” said Pluto Founder and CEO Rani Powers, Ph.D. “We are so thankful for our investors and advisors, and value their support and guidance as we continue to grow our platform.”
Coinciding with this funding milestone, Pluto also launched its free Explore tier today, making more than 10,000 published experiments available to anyone with a free account. Explore users can search for experiments relevant to their interests, and create their own exploratory plots from the data, all from their browser.
