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August 3, 2004
Teranode gets Series A funding
Teranode released this announcement today: Investments Launch Teranode Into the Life Sciences Spotlight. While posting about this is a bit self-serving (since Ignition did the round and I am an observer on the board), I actually wanted to share with everyone some of the larger themes around this investment and take a moment to note what I hope is an emerging trend in NW Venture Capital.
Teranode is one of the first in a new breed of companies that I see growing up in Seattle. It is software meets life sciences. In many ways this is a second generation effect built on the very large software and (until now separate) life sciences communities here.
These two worlds have largely operated in their own worlds until very recently. The software companies were focused on the enterprise, internet, security, internet media, and a host of start-up ideas mainly selling to the IT department or line of business users in enterprise. The biology and chemistry companies have grown up out of various UW programs and around the Fred Hutch. Paul Allen has made a very big bet in South Lake Union to transform that area into a biotech hotbed. But these companies are mainly medical device companies, drug therapies, and other physical product companies.
When you peel back the layers of how people actually work in medicine, biology, and various cancer research organizations, you find a startling lack of good software. Today's enterprise desktop user takes it as a given that they are handed fairly mature set of technology tools (MS Office, Internet, database applications) with which to perform their jobs. With today's service oriented architectures, new IT applications can be developed and deployed in weeks. The bench lab worker, especially in biology, has few such tools. His primary workspace is massive Excel worksheets. There is little centralized database storage or standardized data sharing. Many high-tech machines spin compounds and spit out lots of data, but there is little integration of that data between hardware manufactures. There have been attempts to make "paperless" workflow systems for the bio worker (commonly called Labratory Information Managment Systems - LIMS) but these largely fallen prey to the same problems that doomed such overarching systems in the enterprise. They impose a specific workflow and set of procedures on the worker. If the worker wants to dieviate, the system won't work. To change these systems is a long process requiring lots of IT resources. It is largely like the Mainframe days of office information workers. To me it is like stepping back 15 years.
Now comes companies like Teranode who promise a set of desktop tools that run on a PC which allow one worker to derive value by codifing THEIR OWN SPECIFIC WORKFLOW AND PROCESS. The basic thesis here is to really unlock the power of the desktop PC for the individual researcher. Today it is primarilly a dumb terminal if anything. Teranode is run by an ex-Oracle guy who understands the value of software to the enterprise. He will translate that learning to the bio enterprise. Look for more companies like this as Seattle's two large tech industries, software and biotech, increasingly collide and find reasons to support each other.
Posted by Martin at August 3, 2004 5:59 PM
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