Pictured l-r S. Somasegar, Ted Kummert, Chris Picardo, Barry Wark (seated) Winston Brasor

We are excited to announce today our investment in Ovation.io, a company that is building the next-generation suite of cloud-based clinical informatics tools for the genomic and molecular testing industry. The company was founded by Barry Wark and Winston Brasor, building off of software that Barry originally built while a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle. Ovation’s mission is to provide modern tools to molecular testing labs, allowing them to automate their operations and workflow while simultaneously unlocking the opportunity within their data.

For the past couple years, Madrona has been thinking deeply about the intersection of the life sciences and computer science. We believe that there is a significant amount of innovation waiting to be realized when modern cloud infrastructure and data analytics capabilities meet the vast amount of data and research within the life science and biotech industries. In parallel, significant innovation in the speed and cost of genome sequencing technology has allowed researchers to acquire vast amounts of valuable data and use this to greatly accelerate research and drug development. Existing areas such as diagnostics and new areas such as precision medicine are both rapidly developing due to the proliferation and increasing usability of clinical and genomic data. Activities such as clinical trial recruitment, collecting real world data (“real world evidence” in FDA phrasing), and understanding exogenous health factors are also being re-conceived because of the huge amount of data being generated by the healthcare system. And at the end of the day, easing friction on these activities via modern software will lead to much better health outcomes for patients and data collection and management is at the heart of this process.

One of Ovation’s most important observations was that medical testing labs (and molecular labs in specific) are underserved by modern software. These labs are responsible for conducting the vast amount of tests that care providers order while treating patients. Large names such as Quest and LabCorp may be familiar but there are many independent testing labs taking on the bulk of this workload. Furthermore, independent labs also conduct the majority of molecular and genetic testing for patient diagnosis. Yet many of these labs are still run on legacy software systems that are cumbersome and inefficient and exist as a major point of friction in lab operations.

Ovation has built a modern SaaS solution targeted directly at the needs of these labs. Their product is a modern cloud-based clinical informatics system that handles all major functions: from patient registry, to managing sample workflows, to storing and organizing the data, and finally to managing the revenue and billing process. By implementing true vertical software, labs are much more efficient in their operations and can quickly measure and analyze their workflows and internal data to provide better services and care to patients. And most importantly, Ovation software offers labs the ability to utilize their clinical and genomic data to improve patient diagnostics and long term outcomes. Ovation is also continuing to build intelligence into their software – learning from workflows in order to continuously help automate the testing process for labs. At Madrona we call these types of software “intelligent applications” and Ovation is a prime example in a vertical that needs modern SaaS options.

We met Barry here in Seattle through Mike Self, of StagedotO, a new seed stage venture partnership and were delighted to find some of the themes we had been discussing internally to be at the crux of Ovation’s business. We could not be more excited to be partnering with Barry and Winston for the next step of the Ovation journey and we are thrilled to help them achieve their vision of unlocking genomic data and clinical informatics in the medical world.