SCIMAGIX CLOSES $2.9 MILLION FINANCING TO ENTER IMAGE INFORMATICS MARKET
Scimagix Inc. announced the completion of a $2.9 million equity financing to support the company's emergence into the growing image informatics market. The investors included Tullis-Dickerson & Co. Inc., one of the nation's largest health care venture capital firms, and several Silicon Valley private investors associated with The Band of Angels, Tenex Medical Investors Inc. and The Indus Entrepreneurs.
"There is a growing awareness in the pharmaceutical community of the tremendous value to be gained through better managing and mining visual data to accelerate the drug research and development process," said Michael Schafer, partner at Tullis-Dickerson & Co. "Scimagix has developed the first technology to answer this high demand for immediate image informatics solutions and with this funding is prepared to capture the leadership position in this market."
Scimagix is a pioneer in the field of image informatics -- the extraction, storage, and mining of quantitative visual content from scientific images. With advances in genomic and high-throughput techniques and digital image capture, more visual data is being produced and stored than ever before, yet the development of intelligent technology for extracting this image information has lagged. Scimagix is the first to develop commercial software applications that enable immediate, enterprise-wide access to experimental images from all phases of research and development, allowing researchers to compare visual content from various experiments, identify correlations between images and functional data and derive actionable insight. The company's first products are slated for availability by year-end.
"Customers have told us that as much as 70 percent of their experimental data is image-based; but until now, there has not been an adequate way to mine this valuable visual data," said Dunkle. "We will be able to offer them a means to unlock that image information and enable their researchers to mine visual assets and expedite better products to market."
Scimagix recently appointed Dunkle, former president and CEO of the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR), as president and CEO to lead the company's entry into the image informatics market. Dunkle also serves on the board of directors and joins Nagesh Mhatre, former division president of Becton Dickinson's Immunocytometry Unit; Steven Goldby, chairman and CEO of Symyx Technologies Inc. and chairman of MDL Information Systems; Paul G. Lego, CEO of Virage Inc.; and Michael Schafer of Tullis-Dickerson & Co.