Ozette raises $6M seed funding to accelerate breakthroughs in treating diseases using its AI-powered immune monitoring platform | Tech News | Startups News

Ozette, a Seattle, Washington-based life sciences data startup that develops an artificial intelligence-enabled immune monitoring platform, today announced it has raised $6 million in Series A funding to accelerate breakthroughs in treating disease. The round was led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) and Vulcan Capital.

Founded a year ago, Ozette is a Seattle-based life-sciences data spin-out founded in 2020 and incubated at AI2. Ozette is building a groundbreaking high-resolution immune monitoring platform powered by innovative technologies developed at the Fred Hutch. Ozette’s founders include Fred Hutch scientists Raphael Gottardo, Greg Finak and Evan Greene, who have helped pioneer single-cell computational analysis over the past decade, along with physician and entrepreneur Ali Ansary.

Ozette is a collaboration between the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and AI2. The co-founders are also recognized leaders in single-cell analysis and who have taken a crucial step in biomarker and drug discovery research, driving new therapies. Ozette empowers scientists to quickly extract reliable insights from single-cell data across instruments, experiments, and disease states, with a focus on cancer patients. The data can be used by doctors to diagnose and prescribe medication with greater accuracy.

Commenting on the funding, Greg Finak, Co-Founder and CTO at Ozette said: “We’ve spent a decade working at Fred Hutch to catalyze high-dimensional computational single-cell analysis in academia and industry. Today we can see the composition of the immune system at a much higher resolution.” Finak added, “This deeper level of insight is critical to developing effective disease treatments with fewer side effects and that is something everyone can feel good about.”

Ozette’s Immune Monitoring Platform enables scientists to quickly extract reliable insights from single-cell data across instruments, experiments, and disease states. Having this fully annotated data allows interpretable results for critical decision-making that will improve patient care and patient outcomes.

Ultimately, Ozette will revolutionize the next phase of medicine by providing the platform to empower scientists who are working with single-cell data and automating the manual, labor-intensive process of cell analysis from months of work to just hours. In addition, Ozette is unlocking personalized medicine through targeted therapies based on the profiles of individuals’ immune systems.

“What Ozette is delivering to science and medicine is game-changing because it sheds light on the entire cell profile of the immune system, not just only a small percentage of it,” said Matt McIlwain, Managing Director at Madrona. “Ozette brings together the power of computational biology and data science to the life sciences by building a platform that researchers, academics, and biopharmaceutical companies are able to leverage to find treatments faster than ever before.”

“Think of the Ozette Immune Monitoring Platform like an MRI for the immune system,” said Dr. Ali Ansary, Co-Founder and CEO of Ozette. “Where an MRI shows detailed images around the anatomical structures, our technology delivers a high-resolution view of the immune system at the single-cell level, providing details that haven’t been visible before. This makes treatments safer, faster to develop, and personalized for patients.”

“At AI2 we are constantly looking for scientific potential in artificial intelligence that has the power to improve daily lives, and Ozette does just that,” said Professor Oren Etzioni, CEO of AI2. “Ozette’s Immune Monitoring Platform is exactly what scientists and researchers have been looking for. By allowing organizations to make discoveries faster, and with less risk, it will transform how we interact with medicine.”

AI2 was founded in 2014 with the singular focus of conducting high-impact research and engineering in the field of artificial intelligence, all for the common good. AI2 is the creation of Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder, and is led by Dr. Oren Etzioni, a leading researcher in the field of AI. AI2 employs more than 100 top-notch researchers and engineers from across the globe. AI2 prides itself on the diversity and collaboration of our team and takes a results-oriented approach to complex challenges in AI.