One New York City biotech startup just took a nine-figure leap in the fight to cure cancer.
Flatiron Health, the Manhattan-based developer of cancer-research cloud-platform technology, announced Wednesday that it raised $130 million in a Series B funding round led by its seed investor, Google Ventures. An unspecified amount of that new capital will be spent on Flatiron Health's acquisition of Silicon Valley-based Altos Solutions, a company that specializes in oncology software.
"Flatiron's mission is to organize the world's oncology data and make it useful for patients, physicians, life sciences and researchers," Flatiron Health co-founder Nat Turner said in a statement. "Raising this amount of financing and acquiring Altos Solutions greatly accelerates that vision, and gives us the ability to help both oncologists and most importantly patients on a new level."
After Mr. Turner and his partner Zach Weinberg founded Flatiron Health in late 2012—with capital earned in the sale of the duo's previous startup, Invite Media, to Google—they received $8 million in Series A funding in a January 2013 round also led by Google Ventures. That money led to the development of the "OncologyCloud," Flatiron Health's real-time analytics sharing platform.
The combination of Altos Solutions and Flatiron makes the newly created entity the world's largest single source of oncology data and intelligence.
"By joining forces with Flatiron Health, we're going to deliver even stronger and more tightly integrated solutions to physicians, patients and life science companies," Carla Wood Balch, president of Altos Solutions said in a statement.
The deal is expected to close by the end of this month, at which time Altos will continue to operate independently as a wholly owned subsidiary of Flatiron Health. Per terms of the new funding round, Andrew Conrad, director at Google's semi-secret lab facility Google[X], will join Flatiron Health's board of directors.
"Google-backed startup takes $130M swing at cancer" originally appeared in Crain's New York Business.
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