Valor Ventures Fund 2 is pleased to announce its seventh investment, a $1.75 million Series Seed financing of Allelica, Inc. Valor General Partner Gary Peat joins the Allelica board of directors. In addition to lead investor Valor Ventures, participants in the round included AI-focused venture fund Pi Campus and prestigious genetics research institution Medical Genetics Center (MGZ) in Munich as a strategic investor.
Says Peat, “Allelica brings precision medicine into mainstream clinical practice through a Software-as-a-Service platform for the prediction of complex, genetic diseases using proprietary polygenic risk scores. With major customers across three continents, Allelica is poised to be the first mass adoption of precision medicine. For example, in cardiology, Allelica has partnered with a leader in therapies for Coronary Artery Disease, Merck, to develop data-driven cardiovascular disease-risk stratification tools based upon Allelica’s polygenic risk scores for Coronary Artery Disease.”
Allelica’s co-founders include two of the world’s leading genomic bioinformaticians and Polygenic Risk Score (PRS) scientists, CEO Giordano Bottà, Ph.D. and Chief Science Officer, George Busby, Ph.D., plus data scientist Paolo Di Domenico, Ph.D. Their fundamental research contributions helped develop the algorithms and AI that make genomic analysis possible at scale. With this round, Allelica has hired a Baltimore-based sales leader, Edgar Carter, as VP of Sales.
Bottà says, “The Valor team brings decades of experience investing at seed stage in healthcare information technology and informatics in Allelica’s largest market, North America.”
About Allelica
Allelica uses genomic data to stratify individuals with different trajectories of disease risk. This offers the potential to complement and improve conventional risk prediction and clinical practices in specialties and subspecialties such as fertility, cardiology, oncology, pediatrics, neurology, and more. Allelica’s most recent publication in the American Heart Association’s prestigious journal Circulation this month highlights Allelica’s PRS for coronary artery disease. Through the incorporation of genetics into disease risk assessments, Allelica is improving preventative clinical medicine by helping to identify those who benefit the most from early intervention and behavior modification to reduce lifetime risk. More info: www.allelica.com.
About Valor Ventures
Founded in 2015 to create premium venture capital returns with Valor’s Inclusion Premium strategy, Valor Ventures backs experienced-based founders solving big problems with software at the first professional round. We focus in the fastest-growing, largest region in the US, the Southeast, which features 40% of the U.S. population and the greatest density of under-represented founders. Our mission is making inclusion the new normal in venture capital because diverse teams and boards produce premium returns. Our platform includes Startup Runway, the largest pitch event for underrepresented founders in the country since 2015; the Atlanta Startup Podcast, and Atlanta Tech Park, the 45,000 sqft innovation center dedicated to accelerating local tech innovation globally with more than 50 startup and early-stage companies in residence. More info: valor.vc.
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