San Francisco-Based Phylagen Secures $14 Million

Phylagen, a data analytics company working to build the world’s largest environmental microbiome database, closed $14 million in Series A financing led by Cultivian Sandbox, Breakout Ventures, and Working Capital.

Phylagen developed a microbiome analytics platform to provide insights about global supply chains, empowering stakeholders to trace goods and materials to locations of origin such as exact factories, farms, or warehouses. According to the company, each place and object on Earth has thousands of naturally-occurring invisible microbes, and the genetic information encoded in these microbes creates unique fingerprints for everything from food to textiles to counterfeit goods. Recent advances in bioinformatics and machine learning, combined with rapidly declining costs for DNA sequencing, enabled Phylagen to digitize these microbial fingerprints and create a microbiome database for customers across numerous industries.

The company plans to use the funding to expand Phylagen’s microbial forensics service and grow its microbiome database.