From left: Sébastien de Bournonville, Thomas Pinna and Toon Lambrechts. Image: MyCellHub
Belgian start-up MyCellHub has raised investment to accelerate the launch of its biotech data management platform.
On Thursday (September 12), data management and analytics platform MyCellHub announced that it had raised €1.1m to help biotech companies manage production data.
Investors in the Belgian biotech start-up, which is a spin-out of KU Leuven, include Noshaq, The Faktory, Gemma Frisius Fund and The CoFoundry.
MyCellHub will use the funding to accelerate the launch of its platform, which involves an app that uses interactive work instructions to assist operators in sterile production environments, and automates data collection and reporting tasks.
That start-up said that this “provides significant efficiency gains, especially as more than 90pc of bio-manufacturers still report their processes on paper”.
Preparing for roll-out
Based in Leuven, Belgium, MyCellHub was founded by CEO Toon Lambrechts, CBDO Sébastien de Bournonville and CTO Thomas Pinna. The three co-founders had first-hand experience with how inefficiently bio-process data was typically handled.
After a first implementation and testing period within KU Leuven, MyCellHub became part of the Start it @KBC accelerator. While taking part in the programme, MyCellHub acquired an exclusive licence on the software that was developed within the labs at the university.
The company is now working on the first commercial implementations and a proof-of-concept project. With this week’s funding, the start-up has plans to hire additional software engineers, while reinforcing the company’s sales and customer support organisation to prepare for a European roll-out.
Lambrechts said: “While the biotech industry, and cell-based therapies in particular, are seeing a surge in production volumes, most manufacturers still use paper to register data from their production process.
“This is striking, given that, at the same time, biotech companies are using high-tech tools to literally re-engineer life. With MyCellHub the manufacturers save a lot of time. The platform is easy to implement and significantly facilitates the regulatory compliance processes.
“Additionally, the data analytics capabilities of the platform allow biotech companies to centralise, monitor and structure a lot of process data that was previously not easily available or not even used at all.”
Wim Fyen, investment manager at the Gemma Frisius Fund, added: “We are pleased to support the long-term growth of MyCellHub. The user-friendly data capturing processes, the short set-up times and the low acquisition costs are important differentiators that will allow MyCellHub to gain an important market share in the domain of biotech data management.”
