As companies aim to cut costs and reel in spending amid uncertain macroeconomic conditions, Form Bio thinks it is actually the perfect time to launch its platform. The software company was developed at Colossal Biosciences — known for its goal to bring extinct critters like the wooly mammoth back to life — and is now striking out on its own.
The software Form Bio developed is meant to bring a suite of workflow solutions to the computational biology space, which uses data and modeling to understand biological systems and includes sectors like gene therapy and biotech.
The platform will use machine learning to help researchers and companies go from idea to scientific breakthrough faster by simplifying the data analytics processes in between and allowing users to choose from existing workflow templates that can be edited to fit a company’s specific needs.
Form Bio announced it was spinning out of Colossal Biosciences on September 27 with $30 million in funding led by JAZZ Venture Partners and Thomas Tull, both Colossal Biosciences investors.
Kent Wakeford, the co-CEO of Form Bio, said that the idea for Form Bio started on day one of Colossal’s journey when they tried to get started and realized there wasn’t a one-stop software they could use.
“To get [Colossal] from a point A to point B, we looked at all the different software they were using and it was about 55 different software applications and algorithms,” Wakeford told TechCrunch. “We wanted to create one place that had the toolset but also allowed for collaboration.”
Colossal started to build Form Bio’s software immediately and quickly realized that the machine learning models and algorithms they came up with could be beneficial to other researchers and companies in the computational biology sector.
“The computational biology economy is growing to a $30 billion industry,” Wakeford said. “It’s a huge market that is growing and touching our lives from what we eat, the vaccines we take, what we will ultimately wear and put in our cars. At Form Bio, we could play a central role in helping companies working in these innovations by getting to their breakthrough faster.”
Claire Aldridge, the chief strategy officer at Form Bio, said she joined the company because she felt that it was working on a needed solution for the industry. Aldridge’s background includes wrangling scientific breakthroughs and research out of university labs and into commercial use cases. She thinks having a collaborative workflow tool like this could help tremendously.
“I saw this enormous body of intellectual property where they were doing really good work in the computational biology space but there was no user interface, no ability to scale, no ability to actually get that into the marketplace where it could benefit people outside of themselves,” she said.
Why launch this now? The software had been brewing for the last 18 months, so I was curious why the company decided to spin out now, right as companies are cooling spending on software. Simultaneously, sectors like biotech — which could include a large swath of their customers —are getting hit hard.
For one, Wakeford said that companies may be keen to sign up for the service now because it could help them save money in the long run. It helps cut out the grunt work of data analytics — that someone likely had to be paid to do — and it can also help scientists reduce their margin of error early on, a costly problem on its own.
Users can run their findings and formulas through the platform’s algorithms to test how they will scale. This cuts out the expensive process that used to involve spending a few million dollars to send out a formula that worked in the lab and hoping it would perform the same when manufactured.
Aldridge added that this is also timely because many of the problems Form Bio hopes to help solve, like trying to better determine which formulas will successfully manufacture, have become topics of conversation in the science community only fairly recently.
Wakeford said that Form Bio could be attractive right now to companies in the sector that are venture backed, too. He said most biotech startups raise funding based on when they hit certain breakthroughs and milestones, and if this software speeds up the process between these events, users may be able to raise additional funding on a shorter timeline.
While Form Bio became a solo software startup in a particularly challenging market, Wakeford and Aldridge think the platform is needed enough to outweigh the potential market forces working against it. But Form Bio is done worrying about the markets — it’s already moved on to thinking about potential future features.
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