Whole-genome health testing comes of age

Nucleus lands $14m for AI-powered consumer health platform that provides genetic risk assessments for more than 800 conditions.

Consumer health startup Nucleus Genomics has closed a $14 million Series A funding round supporting its “real-time quantified health platform” based on clinical-grade whole-genome DNA analysis. By providing accurate risk assessments for more than 800 conditions, including cancers, heart disease and Alzheimer’s, the company aims to give people the information they need to take action around their long-term health – all for just $399.

The funding round, which brings the total raised by Nucleus to nearly $32 million, was backed by existing investors, including Reddit, Inc. founder Alexis Ohanian Sr. ’s Seven Seven Six 7??7??6?? and Peter Thiele ’s Founders Fund , as well as new investments from Neo, Giant Step Capital, One Eight Capital , Balaji Srinivasan, PhD and Achal Upadhyaya .

“The next trillion dollar business is going to be in consumer health,” said Ohanian, who has invested more than $10 million in Nucleus through his VC arm. “In today’s healthcare climate, there’s no one else on the market who has built a future-focused, patient-first solution of this caliber.”

Targeting a perceived gap in consumers’ understanding about how their health data interact, Nucleus aims to contextualize each data point with DNA to provide a more complete picture of health.

My take on this: The cost of sequencing the first full human genome was around $3 billion, but today a whole-genome test can be completed for just a few hundred dollars. It was this realization that inspired Nucleus founder Kian Sadeghi to drop out of university and build a company to harness the genome to generate consumer health insights – at an affordable cost. We caught up with Sadeghi to find out more about the company’s approach.

Initially inspired to study computational biology after the loss of his cousin who died of a rare genetic disease, Sadeghi’s made the decision to start a company after learning about the decreasing cost of reading all of someone’s DNA in genetics class.

“I realized the price was obviously going towards zero and everyone was going to be able to get their genome sequenced,” he recalls. “Which meant that someone needs to build the application layer for DNA. So why don’t I give it a shot?”

This led Sadeghi to create Nucleus, a consumer-focused health company offering an accessible clinical grade whole genome health test. But the test itself isn’t the most interesting part of what the company does. As ever, it’s what you do with it that counts.

“Nucleus is really the application layer – we build models or algorithms that analyze DNA,” says Sadeghi. “We’re a software company, principally, and that lets us have an offering that can be more accessible to people. The reason we can keep costs down is because we basically build systems that makes this process super-efficient, and we do it at a scale that no one else really does.”

Discover how Nucleus Genomics is turning personalized health care into reality, straight from Kian Sadeghi right HERE. Plus, learn about Hone Health 's new funding to deepen its entry into longevity.

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