One of Britain’s fastest-growing genomics companies is selling a stake to Tencent, the giant Chinese technology investor, as part of a funding round that also includes a major UK pensions provider.
Sky News has learnt that Cambridge-based Congenica will on Monday announce that it has secured $50m (£39m) in a Series C fundraising.
Legal & General, the FTSE-100 financial services group, is jointly leading the round alongside Tencent, while existing investors including Cambridge Innovation Capital and Downing also participated.
Congenica is a British pioneer in the genomic study of rare diseases and inherited cancer, developing software which enables data analysis 20 times faster than industry averages.
It was created from research conducted by the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the NHS.
The new capital will be used to accelerate the international expansion of the company’s genomic analysis activities and to form new partnerships with drugs giants.
Since being founded in 2014, Congenica has built a global customer base which includes hospitals, diagnostic laboratories and pharmaceutical companies.
It is also the exclusive Clinical Decision Support service provider to the NHS’s Genomic Medicine Service.
Congenica’s new funding comes as the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated a wave of capital flooding into privately owned biotech, healthcare and genomics companies.
It will be the latest British healthtech company that Tencent has pumped money into.
During the summer, the Chinese group acquired a big stake in Oxford Nanopore, a gene-sequencing group.
David Atkins, Congenica chief executive, said: “Genomic medicine is revolutionising healthcare, transforming outcomes for patients by providing clinicians with fast, accurate and early diagnoses and the information needed to provide life-changing answers for their patients, improving wellbeing and disease management.
“This new funding will allow us to build on our established foundation in rare disease and bring the power of our platform to new indications and new markets.”
The company employs 80 people, and prior to its Series C round, had raised a total of £28.5m from investors.
Dr Ling Ge, chief European representative and general manager at Tencent, said: “Congenica’s market-leading technology is designed to enable the delivery of personalised medicine at scale and be fully integrated into routine healthcare customers’ clinical practice on a global basis.
“This represents a significant competitive advantage and the potential to bring genomic medicine into routine use across multiple disease areas driving healthcare systems internationally.”
Its Series C raise was put together by bankers at Lazard.