Code Ocean Announces $16.5 Million in Series-B Funding to Expand Its Digital Lab Platform for Computational Scientists

M12 joins Battery Ventures Co-Lead Round to Extend the Reach of Code Ocean’s SaaS Platform – the New Digital Lab Solution for Computational Scientists 

New York, NY – May 18, 2022 – Code Ocean, the developer of a first-of-its-kind, computational- research laboratory SaaS platform for scientific collaboration and discovery, today announced $16.5 million in Series-B funding co-led by Battery Ventures and M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund. Code Ocean is at the forefront of empowering computational scientists, across disciplines, to focus on science in a digital laboratory. The Code Ocean digital lab provides a consistent and secure environment to automate research in the cloud and guarantee fully reproducible research across scientific disciplines.

“Billions of dollars have been invested by the venture community over the past decade to make the development side of R&D more efficient, leaving researchers, or the ‘R’ side of R&D, starving for a compute platform and tools to make their jobs equally efficient,” said Scott Tobin, a general partner at Battery Ventures who is also a board director of the company. “Code Ocean’s software-as-a-service platform is now the one place where research comes together in a trusted, virtual laboratory space.” 

“We are excited to be leading Code Ocean’s Series-B with Battery Ventures because we believe the company is uniquely positioned to solve some of the most fundamental issues in computational research reproducibility, collaboration, security and productivity as research expands and moves to the cloud, starting with Bio-Pharma,” said Irad Dor, Partner, M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund. “Code Ocean complements our portfolio of companies that enhance the productivity, reproducibility, and shareability of scientific research. By guaranteeing consistent results and accelerating research velocity, scientists can more quickly build on previous advances in research to speed access to new therapies and diagnostics for patients and physicians.”

The core technology of Code Ocean’s digital lab is the Compute Capsule®, a new container technology for science that encapsulates a reproducible, archival, and executable version of an experiment that combines the essential triplet of any computational research work: code, data, and computing environment. The Compute Capsule is built on the concept of Open Science, allowing easy migration of code and data across platforms. By automating the function of Docker, git repositories, Nextflow, and other open-source technologies, the digital lab presents an easy-to-use, automated lab environment to guarantee that researchers can reproduce, reuse, and share computational experiments. The unique capability of the Capsule allows the entire function of the computational experiment to be preserved and re-used in current and future research years into the future.

Capsules, datasets, and results become scientific assets that are managed in a secure, searchable repository. Code Ocean’s cloud-based environment gives IT the capability to monitor and manage access to any computing resource and storage. The Code Ocean platform is completely language agnostic and incorporates cloud workstations for RStudio, Jupyter, Terminal, MATLAB, Shiny, and more.

“A consistent, automated virtual lab is absolutely critical to today’s digital age of science,” said Simon Adar, Co-founder and CEO, Code Ocean. “Computing has given us vastly expanded speed and, simultaneously, dramatically increased complexity. To advance computational science at a faster pace, access to high performance computing for scientists must be simplified to maximize secure, seamless collaboration and speed discoveries to market. Our platform solves the barrier of complexity by providing a digital lab that allows the scientist to focus on science. With greater science productivity, advances in healthcare, including the rapid development of personalized medicine, we will ultimately provide improved healthcare outcomes in the years ahead. Code Ocean is THE hub of sharable scientific knowledge across disciplines.”

Code Ocean’s platform has established a track record of success with researchers and leading bio-pharma companies. Disciplines such as biology, biopharma, chemistry, genomics and emerging areas of computational science, such as AI-driven drug R&D, greatly benefit from Code Ocean’s platform. 

Adopted by premier biopharma companies such as Sema4, Lantern, Champions Oncology, CytoReason, Dragonfly Therapeutics, and others, Code Ocean’s digital lab concept is already lowering the cost of computational research and freeing computational scientists to focus on science. Code Ocean also supports the development of novel technologies in startups through a special access program available to early-stage venture investors such as AION Labs.

“Our scientists, researchers, and data engineers needed a world class environment to create reproducible science in a highly secure and collaborative environment,” said Panna Sharma, President & CEO of Lantern Pharma. “Code Ocean’s digital lab has been an ideal environment for our scientists and engineers to design and scale our proprietary A.I. for drug discovery since it allows them to develop, document and share ideas faster and more efficiently.”

The Code Ocean digital lab is available to researchers and companies in two forms. With advanced features for data storage, analysis pipelines, and API connections to extend the platform, the Code Ocean Enterprise is a secure virtual lab environment that is deployed with automated access to the customer’s private cloud. Code Ocean’s customers have deployed the lab in both secure deployments with protected patient data and laboratory deployments for development and computational experiments. Code Ocean’s platform is also available as a free public platform for any scientific developer and authors publishing through Nature, IEEE, Elsevier, and others. With more than 2,500 public research Capsules with open-source code and immediately available to run in the cloud, Code Ocean is the new benchmark in Open Science.

Code Ocean is currently hiring for all positions in engineering, science, marketing and sales. For more information, please visit codeocean.com

About Code Ocean 

Code Ocean is where great computational science is created, organized and shared in one place. The Code Ocean platform provides the best way for multidisciplinary scientists to standardize workflows, and to track and reproduce all computations and discoveries. By making it easier and more efficient for scientists to collaborate, Code Ocean improves reproducibility, optimizes return on IT investment, and saves time by automating repetitive functions. For more information please visit: codeocean.com and Twitter @CodeOceanHQ.

About Battery Ventures 

Battery partners with exceptional founders and management teams developing category-defining businesses in markets including software and services, enterprise infrastructure, online marketplaces, healthcare IT and industrial technology. Founded in 1983, the firm backs companies at all stages, ranging from seed and early to growth and buyout, and invests globally from six office locations: Boston; San Francisco and Menlo Park, Calif.; Herzliya, Israel; London; and New York. Follow the firm on Twitter @BatteryVentures, visit our website at www.battery.com and find a full list of Battery’s portfolio companies here.

About M12 

M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, invests in enterprise software companies primarily in the Series A through C funding stages with a focus on applied AI, business applications, infrastructure, security, and vanguard technologies. As part of its value-add to portfolio companies, M12 offers unique access to strategic go-to-market resources and relationships globally. M12 has offices in San Francisco, Seattle, London, Tel Aviv, and Bengaluru. https://m12.vc