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Venture Capital News: Bina Technologies Adds $1.75M

2013-07-30
REDWOOD CITY, CA, Genomic big data science platform accelerating personalized medicine, today announced that they have added to their Series B financing round with $1.75M in additional funding, bringing their total Series B round to $8M.
Bina Technologies, the genomic big data science platform accelerating personalized medicine, today announced that they have added to their Series B financing round with $1.75M in additional funding, bringing their total Series B round to $8M. The additional funding was led by Mohsen Moazami at Columbus Nova Technology Partners (CNTP) and Jerry Yang at AME Cloud Ventures.

Today, new data-driven advancements in healthcare continue to gain investor interest for their potential to increase the quality and decrease the cost of healthcare. Moreover, increasing access to fast, accurate and scalable genomic analysis through early, strategic investment is at the forefront of new innovations across the healthcare system, enabling more personalized medical treatments to patients downstream.

'We are at a pivotal time in the field of genomic analysis as the availability and amount of data grows exponentially,' said Narges Bani Asadi, CEO of Bina Technologies. 'We chose to seek investment from Columbus Nova and ACM Cloud Ventures because each of them understand this data-driven reality and the disruptive changes that will soon occur in our health system because of it. Bina is building the comprehensive platform to allow researchers and clinicians to extract meaningful insights from this data, and we are thrilled to be working with such premier life sciences and technology investors that understand and support the power of the genomics revolution.'

This new capital will help further Bina's mission to become a more integrated genomic analysis platform company and unlock the potential of DNA-based medicine and biotechnology by delivering fast, accurate and scalable genomic analysis.

'As the global scientific community seeks new approaches for the treatment and prevention of disease, large-scale genomic analysis has quickly become a foundational asset in this new era of data-driven medicine,' said Yahoo! Inc. co-founder, Jerry Yang, who now heads AME Cloud Ventures. 'We are proud to add Bina's talented team to our list of portfolio companies and support them as they apply big-data innovations to accelerate the discovery of new therapies and insights for genetic diseases.'

'Genomic analysis paired with big data initiatives has the potential to transform medicine by improving the tools and techniques needed to access, organize, and make medical discoveries from huge volumes of DNA data,' said Mohsen Moazami, general partner at Columbus Nova Technology Partners. 'At Columbus Nova, we believe Bina's platform is extremely well-positioned to help drive that change by making a significant difference in terms of accuracy and speed for production-scale genomic analysis.'

Bina previously announced a $6.25M raise in late March led by Sierra Ventures.

Simultaneously, the company announced the addition of three experienced executives to further strengthen its senior management team. Sharon Barr will join the Bina team in mid-August as the Vice President of Engineering, Take Ogawa joined the company as Director of Field Sales, and Thomas Kanar joined the company as CFO.

Sharon Barr comes to Bina from Couchbase, a NoSQL database technology company based in Mountain View, CA, where he held the title of VP of Engineering. Prior to Couchbase, Barr was Director of Engineering at Yahoo! Inc. He holds a B.A. in Computer Science and Economics from Tel Aviv University and earned his MBA at San Jose State University.

Take Ogawa joined the company having held increasingly senior commercial roles at Complete Genomics, RainDance Technologies, Roche and Invitrogen.

Tom Kanar joins Bina from Autonet Mobile, where he served as CFO. Prior to that role, Kanar served as the CFO at Coapt Systems. Tom holds a B.A. in Accounting from Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, PA.

Upon the closing of the Series B round, Bina has also made significant progress towards its plans to aggressively expand its marketing, sales and support teams. In addition to the hire of Take Ogawa, Susan Tang has also come onboard as Senior Product Manager to help manage the product roadmap and next-generation products. Susan brings valuable experience from DNAnexus, Pacific Biosciences and Life Technologies.

Other recent, new hires include: Dr. Shan Yang as Scientific Applications and Support Manager, Larry Kopjak as Director of Sales Operations and Dr. Hugo Lam as a Senior Member of the computational biology team. To accommodate this influx of personnel, Bina Technologies has moved its headquarters to a larger space, but remains based in Redwood City, CA.

To learn more about Bina Technologies, please visit: http://binatechnologies.com.

About Bina Technologies

Bina is the big data science platform accelerating personalized medicine for researchers and clinicians requiring fast, accurate and scalable genomic analysis. We develop cutting-edge big data technologies to dramatically reduce the amount of time and money required to process raw genetic data in order to generate insights for personalized medicine.

Bina was started in 2011 by a team of Stanford and Berkeley researchers and entrepreneurs, with the vision that whole genome sequencing (WGS) is just the beginning of a brighter future. Bina is accelerating personalized medicine, one genome at a time. We are a team of data scientists, bioinformaticians, software developers and high performance computing experts working in harmony in Redwood City, California. To learn more, visit: http://binatechnologies.com.

About Columbus Nova Technology Partners

The CNTP team is comprised of an accomplished group of entrepreneurs and operating executives who have experienced the full lifecycle of technology companies from beginning to end from start-ups to multi-billion dollar Fortune 50 companies. We pride ourselves in playing the long game, prioritizing long-term relationships with companies holding the greatest potential over those with odds for a quick exit. This investment philosophy offers portfolio companies a steady investment partner across their entire life cycle. In this age of globalization, if technology firms do not embed global thinking into their strategy from inception, they are not maximizing their potential. CNTP partners have extensive global experience and a superior network of contacts that help our entrepreneurs with a global footprint from the outset. To learn more, visit: http://www.cntp.com.

About AME Cloud Ventures

AME Cloud Ventures is created by entrepreneur and Yahoo! Inc co-founder, Jerry Yang, as his innovation technology investment firm. It helps entrepreneurs from a very early stage by nurturing them with the resources, advice, and financial support to grow their companies. For more information visit http://www.amecloudventures.com.
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