Riffyn Secures $1.8 Million Seed Financing to Advance Reproducible Research
OAKLAND, 17 November 2014 / Sciad Newswire / Riffyn, Inc. has raised $1.8 million in a Seed financing round led by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, with additional investments from Bioeconomy Capital and others. Riffyn provides experimental process design and analytics software to improve reproducibility and tech transfer in life science, chemical and materials research and development. The financing accelerates Riffyn’s efforts to bring manufacturing-grade quality practices to R&D organizations via compelling, collaborative software.
“Reproducibility in research has long been a barrier to science-driven impact” said Tim O’Reilly, general partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. “We see many exciting parallels between Riffyn’s approach to life science and materials research, and the game-changing analytics and continuous deployment techniques of software development.”
Segments of the scientific community presently suffer from reproducibility rates as low as 10% on published research due to uncontrolled experimental noise. Such noise is hindering the advancement of scientific knowledge, contributing to unpredictable product development timelines and underlying multi-million dollar failures in technology transfer to clinical trials or manufacturing. Riffyn’s software aims to dramatically reduce such noise and increase the returned value from more than $400 billion invested globally each year in life science and materials R&D.
“Customer enthusiasm for our product has been tremendous,” said Tim Gardner, Founder/CEO of Riffyn. “There is an urgent need for tools that improve the reliability and transferability of R&D outputs.”
The core of Riffyn’s product is an experimental process design, data acquisition and analytics engine that provides manufacturing-grade quality improvement capabilities via a visual interface. The engine delivers scientific insights by exposing trends and causal relationships between experimental variables. The software also provides the design flexibility and collaboration tools needed to continuously innovate.
The company will use the funds to advance its product to beta release in summer 2015 and commercial launch in late 2015. In addition, the company will expand its commercial development, open science and open source activities through engagements with academic, maker, government and corporate stakeholders in reproducible research.
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About Riffyn, Inc.
Riffyn (www.riffyn.com) was formed in May of 2014 by a team of biological engineering, chemical engineering, software engineering and publishing veterans with decades experience in R&D, scale-up, manufacturing, data systems and open science. The company’s cloud software and internet of things devices unite computer-aided experimental design, real-time data acquisition and analytics, and collaborative versioning to reduce error and accelerate innovation. The company serves global customers from its offices in Oakland, CA and London, UK.
Additional background for journalists
The ‘reproducibility crisis’ in science:
- Nature special focus on reproducibility http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/reproducibility/
- How to Make More Published Research True PLoS Medicine (Oct 2014)http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1001747
- A swan in the making Science (Aug 2014) http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/855.full
Contact at Riffyn
(US) Timothy Gardner , +1 510 542 9696, tg@riffyn.com
Or
(UK) Matthew Cockerill, +44 7958 440 253, mc@riffyn.com
Media Contact
SCIAD Communications – Sylvie Berrebi, +44 7795 197271 (UK cell), Sylvie@sciad.com
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