Project Sapiens, a young medical technology and lifestyle company, has retrospectively issued company filings indicating they raised £6.18m in equity finance last October. Interestingly, this was just two months after the entity was incorporated. The same filings indicate they received a pre-money valuation of £11m, which if correct is considerable for such a young company.
Who backed this large pre-seed round? On their latest annual report, filed in August, several venture capital funds are now listed: Accomplice, Karog Invest (based in Paris), Daphni, and Mosaic Ventures. Considering the company has only completed one round of equity finance, we can be almost certain that these funds participated.
Such a high valuation suggests the company is sitting on some exciting IP, and/or that their senior management team has an impressive track record. The latter is certainly true: project Sapiens is led by alumni of Oxford, Cambridge and MIT, including an ex-director at Yahoo, and the ex-CEO of HouseTrip. Their board also includes Tim Spector, Professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College and the author of The Diet Myth, which argues that a person’s health is heavily dependent on their microbiome (gut bacteria makeup – there are over a 1,000 species of bacteria in our intestine alone).
Their technology is also interesting, purportedly using machine learning to suggest changes to a customers diet based on their genomic and microbiome data. However, the company is still in a very early stage, and it’s unclear whether they will occupy a consumer-focussed niche, or whether they will seek to work with healthcare providers.
Project Sapiens now joins a new wave of companies operating in the personal genomics analysis sphere, who have been spurred by the huge drop in technology costs. These companies operate on a similar model – customers purchase a genetic testing kit, which they use at home before sending to the company’s analysis lab.
