Israeli SaaS Company Code Ocean Raises $16.5 To Expand Digital Lab Platform

Israeli computational research SaaS company Code Ocean, announced last Wednesday the completion of a $16.5 million Series B funding round to expand its digital lab platform. 

The round was co-led by investment firms Battery Ventures and Microsoft’s venture fund M12. 

This latest capital has enabled the company to open hiring with those with skills and experience in engineering, science, marketing, and sales.

Founded in 2016, Code Ocean developed a digital laboratory that provides computational scientists with a secure space to automate, reproduce, share and research across a wide spectrum of scientific disciplines in the customer’s private cloud. The platform has benefited researchers working in biology, biopharma, chemistry, genomics, and emerging areas of computational science, such as AI-driven drug R&D.

The system runs on CPUs or GPUs, which allows users to run code published in academic journals and conferences, gain access to the published software code and data from scientific journals such as Nature, IEEE, and Elsevier to view and download for free, and execute published code without having to install anything on their personal computer. 

Code Ocean’s platform is powered by its Compute Capsule, a new type of container technology that hosts a user’s code and everything else that the code needs in order to run, which includes any supporting data, and a specification of the computational environment––the specific versions of the operating system, packages, and libraries, among others on which the code is dependent. The Compute Capsule is built on the concept of Open Science, simplifying the migration of both code and data across platforms, and it enables the entire function of a  computational experiment to be preserved for any future research years later. 

Biopharma companies like Sema4, Lantern, Champions Oncology, CytoReason, and Dragonfly Therapeutics, among others have lowered the cost of their computational research using Code Ocean’s digital lab platform. 

“A consistent, automated virtual lab is absolutely critical to today’s digital age of science,” said Simon Adar, Co-founder and CEO, Code Ocean. “Computing has given us vastly expanded speed and, simultaneously, dramatically increased complexity. To advance computational science at a faster pace, access to high performance computing for scientists must be simplified to maximize secure, seamless collaboration and speed discoveries to market. Our platform solves the barrier of complexity by providing a digital lab that allows the scientist to focus on science. With greater science productivity, advances in healthcare, including the rapid development of personalized medicine, we will ultimately provide improved healthcare outcomes in the years ahead. Code Ocean is the hub of sharable scientific knowledge across disciplines.”

“Our scientists, researchers, and data engineers needed a world class environment to create reproducible science in a highly secure and collaborative environment,” said Panna Sharma, president & CEO of Lantern Pharma. “Code Ocean’s digital lab has been an ideal environment for our scientists and engineers to design and scale our proprietary A.I. for drug discovery since it allows them to develop, document and share ideas faster and more efficiently.”