CAMBRIDGE, Mass.– Watershed Informatics, developer of a multi-omics insight platform for biopharmaceutical discovery teams, today announced the closing of a $14.5M Series A financing led by Canvas Ventures, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Accomplice Ventures. This investment enables Watershed to strengthen commercial traction, accelerate product innovation, and ultimately transform how scientists discover medicines with multi-omics.
Genomics, and more broadly speaking, multi-omics, are a set of technologies and approaches that provide an unprecedented amount of data and detail for scientists to understand all levels of biological activity. Ever since the first human genome was sequenced, scientists have hoped to turn these data into cures, but with a few notable exceptions, have yet to deliver on this promise. With recent explosive advancements in high throughput lab instrumentation, AI-powered analytics, and cloud computing, that revolution is finally within reach.
Even though tools for building precision medicines exist, they remain fragmented. Integrating them is simply off-limits to all but the best-funded institutions, requiring massive time and resource commitments but without any guarantee of success. To address this unmet need, Watershed developed Omics Bench, a platform to bring together disparate tools into one unified ecosystem on the cloud, empowering scientists to go from sample to therapeutic insight in a single day.
“While the size and variety of data in the life sciences has grown exponentially for the past two decades, there remains a lack of centralized and collaborative platforms serving both biologists and bioinformaticians,” said Watershed co-founder and CEO, Jonathan Wang. “After years of tackling tough high-performance computing and user interface challenges, we have invented new ways for any user—regardless of computational skill—to independently create, seamlessly share, and expertly customize multi-omics workflows.”
The Omics Bench provides comprehensive workflows and associated visualizations for whole-genome sequencing, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics, microbial sequencing, and protein-folding. By striking the right balance between simplicity and functionality, Watershed has attracted a growing community of users looking to design and iterate experiments with confidence and ease.
“Watershed has been executing at an incredible pace for the last three years, creating an exceptional platform that solves real-world drug discovery needs,” said Paul Hsiao, founding partner at Canvas Ventures, who has joined the company’s Board of Directors. “We are excited to partner with them as they continue to break down barriers impeding biomedical discovery.”
