Serial startups on the DNA sequencing trail

In the last post, we looked at the widget for an emerging startup coming out of the intersection of Stanford engineering and medical innovations and concluded by asking the question does the widget convey the pedigree of the team at a glance. I hope you tried it out. Let's look at another company spinning up, does this widget tell the story?

We again find a pair of serial entrepreneurs, Drs. Malek Faham and Thomas Willis. A UCSF and Stanford team, they previously founded ParAllele which was acquired by Affymetrix for $120M. The related patents look a little dated (the blue bars for patents start with the patent filing and end with the patent issued, so we can see the long patent process). In fact, we can read the innovation disclosure from 1995 we see (the Red Diamond in the graph and red box in the timeline) which was re-released in Mar 2013 as available for licensing as described in the OTL Docket page (with the VL widget embedded!). Sequenta was founded in 2008 to develop a molecular diagnostics platform focused on immune system profiling taking advantage of recent innovations in next-generation DNA sequencing. They received $13M in venture funding in 2010 from Mohr Davidow Ventures, the same investor who funded ParAllele. 

You can explore the interactive widget by clicking the image above to drill into Dr Willis' background by clicking his orange node, then clicking "Navigate to ... Open in Visible Legacy Navigator" ... or just click the image below.  We see more about Dr Willis' collaborations

We find Professor Ronald W. Davis mentioned in several recent blogs, so we know that Sequenta can reach back into Stanford for resources and connections. The widget is a visual representation of the team's "About" page, but there is more context behind the story just a click away in Visible Legacy Navigator.