Ozette announces $26m in Series A funding for AI-powered single-cell immune discovery technology

Ozette Technologies, Inc. has announced its $26 millon Series A funding, led by Madrona Ventures.

Other participating investors include Cercano Management (formerly Vulcan Capital), M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, Alexandria Venture Investments, OCV Partners and Duke University.

Ozette’s intelligent computational analysis technology has been designed to unlock the full potential of single-cell data.

The AI-powered analysis, rooted in research pioneered at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and incubated at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), reveals high-resolution, reliable insights an order of magnitude faster than the gold standard manual analysis.

Ozette’s early partners include small to large biopharma developing therapies in oncology, autoimmune disorders and infectious disease.

The speed and resolution of Ozette’s automated insight generation unlocks new frontiers in computational immunology, accelerating the next wave in biomarker and drug discovery.

The new funding will fuel company growth and enable Ozette to expand its capabilities across a multiomic platform, integrating single cell proteomics and transcriptomics.

A new state-of-the-art immunology lab in development will soon offer another asset and avenue for partners to leverage Ozette’s technology, further enabling vertically integrated, automated analysis for immune insights.

Dr. Ali Ansary, CEO and Co-founder of Ozette, said:

“Ozette’s technology alleviates partners from labour intensive, manual analysis methods and propels us towards a future with integrated, searchable immune data that transforms therapeutic discovery and development.

“We’ve engineered a machine learning-based computational platform that completes months of analysis work in a matter of days, and we’re working on reducing that to minutes.

“Ozette represents the first line of innovation towards a fully resolved portrait of the immune state at the cellular level, providing transparent, verifiable, and reproducible high-resolution insights that scientists can trust.”

In a 2021 study, Ozette’s technology was able to automatically resolve several hundred distinct immune cell populations, and find a correlation between drug response and a set of rare cell populations that had never been characterised previously.

Ozette has continued to work with the Cancer Immunotherapy Trials Network and other partners to look at over $100 million of clinical trial data to date.

Breakthrough scientific research that used Ozette’s core technology recently published in Nature identified a subset of T cells that appear to shield solid tumors from immune attack, helping explain why cutting-edge immunotherapies that work against blood cancers are less effective against solid tumors and forging a path for future drugs and therapies that address this nuance.

Matt McIlwain, Managing Director at Madrona, said:

“Ozette’s prescient technology is realizing the future of better healthcare today with unprecedented vision, speed, and invaluable context to unlock how our immune system responds to adversity.

“We continue to back industry’s most brilliant scientific and technological minds that are driving innovation as they break traditional biotech barriers using intelligent applications to unite disciplines for the greater good.

This funding is a testament to the Ozette team and mission, the unique position they hold in the market, and the immense confidence from the industry as they rapidly scale their work helping industry treat and prevent disease.”

Ozette’s interdisciplinary team is made up of a deep bench of scientists, engineers and designers with a wide range of experience spanning Genentech, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Airbnb, and more.

Notable recent hires include Amarjit Kaur, VP of Engineering at Ozette, previously with SayKara/Nuance (acquired by Microsoft).

“Everything we do, from research and partnerships to company growth, is centered around valuing people first and is working toward our vision for a future when life-saving and life-improving drugs reach market faster,” said Ansary.