Colour, which began as a genetic testing service, shortly discovered a second use for its expertise: facilitating Covid-19 testing.
The Burlingame, Calif.-based is working with greater than 100 corporations and governments to facilitate their testing packages, together with Salesforce, United Airways and the state of California, the place it’s working with PerkinElmer to course of as much as 150,000 Covid-19 checks each day.
Now, with $167 million in new funding, the corporate plans to proceed to construct out infrastructure for testing and different preventive companies.
“We realized one of many greatest challenges was easy methods to get healthcare companies to folks,” CEO Othman Laraki mentioned in a cellphone interview. “The Covid-19 disaster introduced that focus with plenty of readability.”
Colour was based in 2015, and has since struck a number of high-profile partnerships. Final 12 months, Alphabet’s Verily introduced within the startup to supply genomic companies for members in its Mission Baseline well being research. It was additionally tapped by the NIH’s All of Us Analysis Program to function the initiative’s nationwide genetic counseling service.
In Might, the corporate obtained an emergency use authorization to make use of loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) expertise for Covid-19 testing, which makes use of a constant temperature to amplify viral genome segments, as an alternative of the a number of heating and cooling cycles with PCR testing. Two months later, it received the inexperienced gentle to make use of this expertise for unmonitored testing, which means sufferers can swab themselves.
These experiences made Colour understand that its greatest worth was on this infrastructure that it had created, Laraki mentioned.
“Individuals get excited in regards to the science,” he mentioned. “Actually, most of public well being is logistics. How do you make basic items obtainable to folks the place they reside and the place they work?”
With many states nonetheless grappling with how they may roll out Covid-19 vaccines to the general public, Colour additionally seeks to help that course of. To date, the U.S. has grappled with shortages, wasted doses and challenges in figuring out easy methods to greatest distribute a vaccine.
“We’ve had main well being wants on the inhabitants facet for a really very long time. It’s been demise by a thousand cuts. What’s occurring right here is we’re creating an entry mannequin for fundamental companies at key social aggregation factors: faculties, employers, neighborhood settings,” Laraki mentioned. “That is making a nationwide useful resource for entry and distribution of those companies that may outlast the present pandemic.”
Normal Catalyst and T. Rowe Value Associates led the sequence D funding spherical, which values Colour at $1.5 billion.
“The chance to design the way forward for public well being by way of expertise can’t be overstated,” Normal Catalyst Managing Director Hemant Taneja mentioned in a information launch. “Colour understands that always, challenges in healthcare aren’t scientific or medical in nature, however somewhat as a result of entry limitations. The hyper-scaling of entry is probably probably the most impactful operate of digital expertise – and the truth that Colour approaches healthcare from this vantage level makes it among the many most necessary corporations within the business.”
Photograph credit score: aurielaki, Getty Photographs