UK’s Lifebit raises €51.7M in Tiger Global-led round to help cure infectious disease using data; here’s how

London-based Lifebit Biotech Ltd, a company that empowers therapeutic leaders and pioneers in precision medicine to access and analyse siloed biomedical data, announced that it has raised $60M (approx €51.7M) in its Series B round of funding. 

The round was led by the global investment firm Tiger Global Management. Existing investors Eurazeo, Pentech Ventures, and Beacon Capital also participated in this round.

Capital utilisation

The funds will be used to further Lifebit’s global expansion, focus on customer success, and accelerate the growth of its team. In addition, the company will also double down on its client success – fueling further support for existing partners, as well as those to come.

Lifebit will also leverage Tiger Global’s depth of expertise in effectively scaling software companies and accelerating product development as it expands globally.

Dr Maria Chatzou Dunford, CEO of Lifebit, says, “Making distributed highly-sensitive biomedical data usable while keeping it secure in-place and combining it with other data has never been possible, until now. It’s great to see how excited our investors are to support our mission and first-of-its-kind transformative technology. With this new strategic backing, we will continue to expand our global presence, with a focus on customer success and accelerating the growth of our team.”

What does Lifebit offer?

Founded in 2017 by Maria Chatzou Dunford and Pablo Prieto Barja, Lifebit offers a suite of AI-powered software solutions and builds in-house enterprise data platforms to accelerate drug discovery and development.

Unlocking access to biomedical data can help get rid of society’s most devastating diseases. Though biomedical data has witnessed growth in recent years, estimates suggest that by 2025, 500 million human genomes will have been sequenced, amassing more data than YouTube and Twitter combined. But only a fraction of it is being used for drug discovery and precision medicine.

According to the World Economic Forum, 97 per cent of all data produced by hospitals each year goes untouched. This is because the data needed for such work is often inaccessible and unusable because of governance, regulations, privacy and security concerns, or inadequate technology.

Lifebit builds enterprise data platforms for organisations with complex and sensitive biomedical datasets. This patented technology solves the biggest roadblock for precision medicine – making highly sensitive biomedical data securely accessible by bringing researchers’ analysis and computation to where the data resides, instead of moving data around.

Maria Chatzou Dunford says, “We believe all biomedical data that can be used to save lives should be used. People are dying because of how this data is being handled, and making distributed highly-sensitive biomedical data usable while keeping it secure in-place and combining it with other data has never been possible. Until now.”

The company’s software provides faster data insights, accelerates drug discovery pipelines, and improves the success rate of clinical trials. Lifebit has acquired high-profile clients across the public and private sectors, including contracts to power the UK Government agency, Genomics England, and a long-term AI-partnership with German pharma giant Boehringer Ingelheim.