Code Ocean Announces $21 Million in Funding to Accelerate in Biotech

New York, NY – May 17, 2021 – Code Ocean, the leading computational research environment for sharing scientific discoveries, today announced that it has raised a total of $21 million in funding, including a $15M Series A round of funding led by Battery Ventures, with investment from Digitalis Ventures, EBSCO, Vaal Partners and other institutional and individual investors. With this funding, Code Ocean will accelerate development of its leading environment, which empowers researchers to continuously organize, execute, and share research end-to-end, thereby increasing efficiency and reproducibility. Code Ocean is currently hiring for all positions in engineering, marketing, and sales.

“We’re excited to invest and partner in such a large market opportunity with Code Ocean,” said Scott Tobin, General Partner, Battery Ventures, who is also a board director of the company. “Code Ocean is riding the next wave of innovative companies who are reinventing scientific tools and platforms, and we believe their unique technology has immense potential.”

Until now, researchers have struggled to close their technology gaps in order to keep pace with a growing amount of data. They often find themselves wasting precious time with rote DevOps tasks and operating in silos, unable to effectively collaborate on their research with others in a secure fashion. Unfortunately, this results in slow discovery progress and a low reproducibility rate — in fact, more than 70% of computational research is non-reproducible.

“With the current growth in the Biotech sector, the amount of big, multimodal data is increasing rapidly,” said Simon Adar, Co-founder and CEO, Code Ocean. “Consequently, we see demand emerging for our new category of modern computational research platforms, which increases reproducibility and is significantly easier to use than traditional ad hoc, standalone science and IT operational data and analysis platforms.”

One of the key differentiators of Code Ocean’s approach is its Compute CapsuleTM, which creates a software package comprising the essential triplet of any computational research work today: code, data and a Docker-ized container that enables researchers to reproduce, reuse and collaborate. Capsules, datasets and results become assets and are managed in a secure searchable repository. Code Ocean’s cloud-based environment manages access control and automates the use of any computing resource and storage. The Code Ocean platform is completely agnostic and incorporates RStudio, Jupyter, Terminal, MATLAB, Shiny, Git, and more.

“What I love about Code Ocean is how the platform facilitates more seamless collaboration and awareness of what our different groups are doing, and how it is better wired together throughout the company,” said Eric Schadt, Ph.D., Founder and CEO, Sema4, a patient-centered health intelligence company. “For us, it solves one of our biggest obstacles, which is how innovation propagates between smart groups that operate in silos. It was amazing to see how adoption caught fire on the inside completely organically.”

In aggregate, Code Ocean’s open cloud has processed hundreds of thousands of complex computations for scientists from more than 1,000 universities. Code Ocean also has partnerships with leading research publishers such as Nature, AACR, IEEE, Elsevier, and others. Although Code Ocean’s open-access cloud can be used for any type of research, its new Enterprise offering has achieved exceptional early adoption in the biotech, pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, in which it serves premiere corporate customers such as Sema4, Champions Oncology, CytoReason, Dragonfly Therapeutics, among others.

“Code Ocean enabled us to move from individual mode to true teamwork and allowed us to develop standards for the group and share code efficiently,” said Yair Benita, Ph.D., Head of Science Operations, CytoReason. “Once we were all on board sharing code and workflows, the group started moving quickly, the quality of our work was higher, we improved as we moved while being able to reproduce every result and document our work easily.”

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

About Code Ocean

Code Ocean is where great computational research is created, organized and shared in one place. The Code Ocean platform provides the best way for research teams to standardize research workflow, and to track and reproduce all computations and discoveries. By making it easier and more efficient for researchers to collaborate, Code Ocean improves reproducibility, optimizes return on IT investment, and saves time by automating repetitive functions.