(Amplion Screenshot)

Amplion, a startup that helps healthcare companies sort through biological data, closed a Series A fundraising round led by Greycroft with participation from existing investors Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and Imagen Capital Partners. The Bend, Ore.-based company plans to put the fresh cash into sales, marketing and product development efforts. It declined to say how much was raised as part of the round.

Amanda Enstrom, chief product officer at Amplion. (Amplion Photo)

“Every week there are thousands of clinical trials as well as research articles being published,” said Dr. Amanda Enstrom, chief product officer at Amplion. “Precision medicine really needs to be able to quickly synthesize a subset of information. It’s critical to their drug development process.”

Amplion’s core product, called Biomarkerbase, combs through information published to resources such as ClinicalTrials.org or PubMed.gov and identifies therapeutically important biomarkers, which are molecules that indicate diseases and other biological states. Those biomarkers are then used by healthcare organizations for research, diagnostics and drug development. Amplion’s clients include Shire, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Bio-Rad Laboratories.

“The body of work surrounding biomarkers has gone far beyond human scale in terms of both breadth and fluidity,” Will Szczerbiak, principal at Greycroft, said in a statement. “Amplion’s AI models put the entire biomarker corpus of knowledge at users’ fingertips, allowing the latest research and insights to be understood in real-time.”

The company also sells software that lets business development and marketing professionals track the progress of other drug developers in order to find potential clients and partnership opportunities.

Amplion CEO Chris Capdevila. (Amplion Photo)

Last year, Amplion welcomed Chris Capdevila as CEO. Capdevila was the co-founder of venture capital fund FoundersPad — an Amplion investor — as well as the founder of LogicalApps, which was acquired by Oracle in 2007.

After Capdevila took the reins, the startup has also brought on Enstrom, the former director of Aduro Biotech, as well as ex-Google and Microsoft engineer Mike Harrington as chief technology officer. Harrington also co-founded Valve Software and Picnik.

Amplion was co-founded by chief technology officer Adam Carroll and John Audette, who left the company in 2016.

In 2014, the company won $400,000 as part of a competition at Bend Venture Conference as well as backing from Seven Peaks Ventures.

Other Pacific Northwest startups in Greycroft’s portfolio include Glow, Ictertis, Streem, Amplero, LumaTax, and more.

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