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The Truveta team at its Bellevue, Wash., headquarters last year. (Truveta Photo)
Seattle-area health data company Truveta announced $320 million in fresh funding and an ambitious new initiative to create a giant genomic dataset.
The new investment — which comes from 17 health systems, Illumina, and Regeneron — pushes Truveta’s valuation above $1 billion, making it the latest unicorn to emerge from the Seattle region.
Founded in 2020, Truveta aims to aggregate medical records data from 30 partner institutions to link treatments with outcomes and underlying health. Its platform has 120 million de-identified patient medical records updated daily.
The Bellevue, Wash.-based company describes its new Truveta Genome Project as the “largest and most diverse database of genotypic and phenotypic information ever assembled” that is more than ten times the scale of previous endeavors including NIH’s All of Us and the UK Biobank, according to the startup.
Truveta will work with its health system partners to gather leftover biospecimens from routine lab tests that are linked to de-identified medical records for anonymized genetic research. Regeneron Genetics Center will sequence the exomes of the first ten million volunteers.
“The scale and diversity of the Truveta Genome Project will enable us to explore the complex interplay between genetics and health in unprecedented detail,” Aris Baras, senior vice president at Regeneron, said in a statement.
Other health systems participating in the project include Advocate Health, CommonSpirit Health, Henry Ford Health, Northwell Health, Providence, and Trinity Health.
Truveta CEO Terry Myerson. (Truveta Photo)
“Discoveries from smaller datasets before today’s AI have led to important new approaches to help prevent heart disease and restore hearing in children with certain forms of congenital deafness — it is so exciting to envision where a complete representative genomic dataset will guide us,” Truveta CEO Terry Myerson said in a statement.
Regeneron, a publicly traded biotech giant, invested $119.5 million in the latest round, while Illumina, another public company that specializes in genetic sequencing, put in $20 million.
“Their investments come with no board seats, no governance over Truveta, and no access to any customer confidential information,” Myerson wrote in a blog post.
Myerson said the new project will help enable precision medicine. “When we have this genetic data linked with longitudinal health information, we will be able to better understand and hopefully prevent disease, not just treat it,” he wrote. “When we have this data, we will finally begin to address the cost of healthcare through early detection and prevention rather than chasing the never-ending challenges of chronic disease management. The impact will be profound.”
Here’s more from Myerson on how the project came together:
“Starting in January 2023, Regeneron became a customer of Truveta to study rare diseases. Through that work, we learned about RGC and its mission to sequence as many people as possible so they could understand the underlying science behind health outcomes. We began collaborating on a fundamental question — what is a long-term sustainable business model that would allow this work to scale to all Americans? The key became reimbursing health systems and RGC for their efforts whenever de-identified data is used by others.”
Truveta’s total funding to date is nearly $500 million. The startup previously raised money from Microsoft, which is the “exclusive cloud provider” for the genome project.
“The opportunity to advance personalized medicine has never been stronger,” Jason Graefe, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said in a statement.
Truveta in 2023 rolled out its own AI model designed to crunch through medical texts and extract patient diagnoses, medications, lab results and other data from sources like physician’s notes and insurance claims.
The company, which has more than 300 employees, previously raised $95 million in 2021. It’s ranked No. 14 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top privately held startups across the Pacific Northwest, and landed on LinkedIn’s recent “Top 50 startups” list.
Truveta joins cybersecurity firm Chainguard as recent Seattle-area startups to top a valuation of $1 billion. New unicorns have been harder to spot in the Seattle region in the past few years, mirroring a trend nationally as valuations took a hit amid the broader venture capital slowdown.
