A lot of money is being poured into genomics lately, including the genomic information company WuXi NextCODE (WXNC), which just announced it has closed on $240 million in Series B financing, led by Sequoia.
We tend to hear very little about this company in the tech industry but Chinese tech billionaire Jack Ma is one of its many backers and WXNC is counted among the largest genetic database outfits in the world, offering B2B products for research and B2C products for the Chinese consumer market.
The company was founded in 2013, as a spinoff of deCODE genetics in Iceland. In 2015 WXNC was acquired by WuXi AppTec, the Chinese and US open access R&D platform. WuXi AppTec then merged the company with its Cambridge, Massachusetts-based sequencing laboratory to create WuXi NextCODE. WXNC is now a standalone subsidiary with offices in Cambridge, Shanghai and Reykjavik.
WXNC’s cloud-based database is used by…