The Venture Codex

Participated · Equity · Jan 2024

Inari develops seed technologies that combine AI-powered predictive design with a multiplex gene editing toolbox to deliver step-change soybean, corn and wheat products. The company is singularly focused on seed technology for large-acre crops and operates an asset-light business model intended to support, not rival, seed companies. Inari reports strong performance from its first-generation products and progress toward commercialization, generating interest from seed companies both within and outside the U.S. Financially, the company completed a $144 million fundraise and has cumulative equity raised of more than $720 million. Founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2016, Inari is based in Cambridge, Mass., with additional sites in West Lafayette, Ind., and Ghent, Belgium, and employs more than 300 people. The new capital is intended to underpin long-term growth as Inari works to bring high-performing products to market at global scale. Inari develops seeds aimed at a more sustainable, nature‑positive food system by combining AI‑powered predictive design with a multiplex gene‑editing toolbox. The company intends to use the new funds to further advance its technology platform and accelerate product commercialization. Inari has a team of more than 300 employees and is led by CEO Ponsi Trivisvavet. Founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2016, the company is based in Cambridge, MA, with additional sites in West Lafayette, Ind., and Ghent, Belgium. The business recently closed a $103M funding round, bringing its total capital raised to $575M. Inari pairs AI-powered predictive design with multiplex gene editing to engineer seeds for the commercial agriculture market. The company focuses on multiplex gene-edited seed technology and advancing product development to deliver new value to growers and supply chains. It plans to use the new capital to further its technology position and expand product development efforts. Inari completed a $124M Series E equity raise and also refinanced and upsized a loan agreement to access up to $60M in debt capital. Led by CEO Ponsi Trivisvavet, the company was founded by Flagship Pioneering and has grown to more than 230 employees. Inari is based in Cambridge, Mass., with additional sites in West Lafayette, Ind., and Ghent, Belgium. Inari has developed a platform that uses predictive design and artificial intelligence to build deep understanding of genes and to design blueprints for combinations of gene‑editing tools that enable multiple edits within a single genome. Those edits produce seeds that aim to increase crop yield while reducing agriculture's footprint. The company focuses on product development for corn and soybeans in North and South America and plans to use the new funds to accelerate advancements across its science platform and product development. Inari raised $208M in a Series D that brought its cumulative equity raised to more than $352M. The round was co‑led by Flagship Pioneering with participation from Alexandria Venture Investments, Investment Corporation of Dubai, Banque Pictet (on behalf of clients), Rivas Capital, and new investors G Squared and Pavilion Capital. Founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2016, Inari is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with additional sites in West Lafayette, Indiana, and Ghent, Belgium. The company is led by CEO Ponsi Trivisvavet and has a team of more than 180 employees. Inari develops next-generation seeds using genetic technologies and data science. Led by CEO Ponsi Trivisvavet, the company focuses on gene-edited crops designed to reduce the natural resources required to grow food. It intends to use recent capital to accelerate development and commercialization of those gene-edited crops. The company was founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2016. Inari is headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., with additional sites in West Lafayette, Ind., and Ghent, Belgium. The company recently completed an $89M equity raise and has secured a $45M loan facility to support its plans.

Participated · Series D · Apr 2022

Clarify Health operates an enterprise analytics and value-based payments platform built on the Clarify Atlas Platform, which maps 300M+ annual patient journeys and delivers 18B+ AI-powered predictions. Its products provide patient-level, on-demand insights to help payers, providers, and life sciences firms optimize care delivery, contracts, networks, and value-based performance. The company says its platform generates insights 30x faster than traditional methods and uses patented automation, grouper technology, and case-mix adjustment that account for social determinants of health. Clarify served over 75 of healthcare’s largest organizations and reported over 100% revenue growth in 2021, with a Net Promoter Score beating industry averages by more than 40%. Recent strategic acquisitions of Apervita’s Value Optimization Business and Embedded Healthcare expand its value-based payments capabilities. Clarify has received industry recognition including Frost & Sullivan’s 2022 North America Customer Value Leadership Award, CB Insights’ 2022 Digital Health 150, and placement on Black Book’s list of top-rated emerging healthcare IT vendors. The company plans to use the new capital to accelerate expansion of its intelligence offerings and broaden adoption of its value-based payments platform. Clarify Health delivers a self-service healthcare analytics cloud and a suite of highly automated business applications for providers, health plans, and life sciences companies. Its platform links government and commercial claims, electronic health records, prescriptions, and social and behavioral data to create longitudinal patient journeys. The company reports a dataset covering over 300 million unique patient lives and uses patented methods to enrich and sequence traditionally siloed and unstructured data. Extensive machine learning is applied to these large cohorts to generate precise, actionable insights on patient journeys, clinical outcomes, and care coordination. Clarify’s applications aim to help customers drive growth, optimize networks, improve care delivery, manage population health, and maximize value-based care performance. The company announced a $115 million Series C to further scale its analytics cloud and business applications. Clarify provides hospitals, health plans, and life sciences customers a real-time care guidance platform that deploys predictive analytics and machine learning across more than 20 terabytes of clinical, claims, social determinant, laboratory, and prescription data. Its Care Journey Platform includes Clarify Care Prism, Care Pilot, and Care Connect to deliver patient-level insights, real-time navigation, and clinician workstations for monitoring and guiding patients. The company says its dataset represents one third of the U.S. population and over 20% of the nation’s health care spend, and it has become a Qualified Entity with access to full Medicare parts A, B, and D data. Clarify reports achieving over $1 billion in improvement at more than 125 health systems, payers, and pharmaceutical companies and deploying cloud-based software at over 5,000 institutions. The company plans to use new funding to expand clinical transformation, sales, engineering, and data science teams, acquire new data assets, and accelerate development of its digital care guidance platform to widen its nationwide reach. The financing is intended to further Clarify’s mission to personalize and optimize every care journey and builds on the company’s rapid customer expansion in 2018.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2022

NextRNA Therapeutics leverages a proprietary discovery platform to systematically identify disease-relevant long non-coding RNAs and their interacting proteins and to develop selective small molecules that modulate those interactions. The company is advancing a pipeline built from that platform and has progressed two small-molecule programs in oncology and immunology. NextRNA was founded in January 2021 and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Leadership and scientific founders include Carl Novina and Robert Langer, and the company cites pioneering work at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute as its scientific basis. At launch NextRNA intends to use financing proceeds to augment its target and drug discovery engine, expand its pipeline, and advance lead programs. The company positions itself to translate discoveries around long non-coding RNAs into transformative therapies across multiple disease areas.

Participated · Series A · Oct 2018

Glympse Bio develops bioengineered, tunable sensors designed to measure disease progression in vivo for protease‑mediated diseases. Its core platform is a biosensor technology intended for applications in fibrotic diseases such as NASH, as well as oncology and infectious diseases. The company was founded in 2015 as an MIT spin‑out and is led by President & CEO Caroline J. Loew, Ph.D., and CSO Wendy Winckler, Ph.D. In October 2019 Glympse announced a strategic collaboration with Gilead Sciences to evaluate the technology as both a diagnostic and prognostic tool. In July 2020 the company closed a $46.7M Series B to continue development of its platform. Board and observer seats were added in connection with the financing, reflecting investor involvement. Glympse Bio is developing an in vivo sensing platform that uses bioengineered activity sensors to noninvasively detect human diseases and monitor drug response. The sensors are designed to travel to sites of disease, directly interrogate biological activity, and emit signals that can be detected noninvasively from a patient’s urine; they can be administered in a minimally invasive manner with selectable analytical readouts. The company reports validation of the technology in 10 different diseases using multiple delivery methods and a broad range of analytical readouts. Its lead indication targets non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which the article states affects more than 100 million people worldwide and over 15 million in the U.S. Proceeds from the financing will be devoted to conducting clinical trials and advancing the pipeline in NASH and cancer into the clinic, and Glympse has signed multiple collaborations in NASH with pharmaceutical companies. Glympse is a spinout from the laboratory of Sangeeta Bhatia at MIT and is based at the Lab Central incubator in Cambridge, MA.

Participated · Series A · May 2018

Gamalon builds decision-tree-based machine learning tools that ingest text into a database and rapidly train editable models to extract information from customer communications. The company released Idea Studio, a product that automatically builds and lets users edit learning trees on the fly as an alternative to opaque neural networks. Gamalon emphasizes an interactive workflow so business analysts, customer-service agents and data scientists can refine models immediately rather than rely on black-box systems. The product is positioned for faster categorization and response in customer service, bot interactions and analyst workflows. The company has 23 employees and six large customers, including Avaya. Gamalon has raised $32 million since its 2013 founding, with DARPA backing in earlier rounds. Gamalon develops a machine intelligence approach called Bayesian Program Synthesis (BPS), commercialized as Gamalon Structure and Gamalon Match. Gamalon Structure converts streams of text paragraphs into clean, structured data rows, and Gamalon Match deduplicates and links those rows. The services are available to select customers as APIs integrated with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Cloud platforms. The company is led by Ben Vigoda. Gamalon raised $4.45M in seed funding and has received approximately $7.2M in DARPA research and development contracts plus about $500K from other government agencies. The financing is intended to support commercialization of its BPS-based products for enterprise data workflows.