Bioz Accelerates Scientific Research and Drug Discovery with First Search Engine Built for Life Science Experimentation

New Software Startup Emerges from the Scientific World with Industry-First Search Engine, $3 Million in Funding and Bioz Star Ratings

PALO ALTO, Calif. July 20, 2016

Bioz, Inc. came out of stealth today with the introduction of the world's first search engine for life science experimentation to speed scientific research into finding cures for diseases and to accelerate drug discovery. Bioz has been enthusiastically welcomed in scientific communities via an early beta program. Currently, over 30,000 users from academic research labs and industry R&D labs, from more than 1,000 universities and biopharma companies, from 40 countries are using Bioz. The company was co-founded by serial entrepreneur and CEO Daniel Levitt, and accomplished Stanford research scientist Karin Lachmi, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer at Bioz.

"We created Bioz to disrupt the slow and siloed nature of life science research by increasing knowledge sharing and successful experimentation, ultimately helping to speed up the rate of drug discovery", said Daniel Levitt, co-founder and CEO of Bioz. "The life science research market is ripe for technology innovation that can streamline experimentation and arm researchers with tools to work faster, smarter and more cost-effectively."

Each year, researchers in academia and biopharma spend $80 billion to purchase millions of products (reagents, consumables and instruments) for use in life science experiments. Some of these products have very high failure rates; a case in point are antibodies that don't work up to 50 percent of the time, and yet before Bioz there was no easy way for researchers to quickly find, compare and select the products that would work best in their specific assays and experiments.

"As a researcher, I can personally attest to the challenges in research trial and error, which slows the pace of scientific discovery and the ultimate path to curing diseases", said Dr. Karin Lachmi, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Bioz. "Here was an opportunity to transform an inefficient product selection process, disrupt the life science tools industry and change the world. If we can help researchers save months of study due to failed experiments, imagine the strides science will be able to make. Bioz has a single mission ÔøΩ to make scientific research faster, more cost-effective and more accurate than ever before."

Typically, life science researchers go through a tedious and manual review process to reference similar published research papers when designing new experiments. But the text in articles is dense and the volume of available material is staggering. A new paper is published every 10 seconds and can run more than 30 pages, creating a limitless haystack of unstructured information.

The Bioz cloud platform's patent-pending software architecture taps the latest advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to mine and structure hundreds of millions of pages of complex and unstructured scientific papers, placing an unprecedented amount of summarized scientific experimentation knowledge at researchers' fingertips. The Bioz platform helps researchers select products, plan experiments, write papers, apply for grants and collaborate, speeding up experimentation and drug discovery.

Introducing the Bioz Star System

Today, the company also introduced Bioz Stars, the first and only unbiased rating system to help scientists around the world to quickly identify the right products for their experiments. Bioz Stars are unbiased and objective algorithmic ratings that are displayed for over 200 million life science products, tools, reagents, lab equipment, instruments, assays and kits. Bioz Stars are based on the analysis of millions of peer-reviewed papers using a groundbreaking algorithm with weighted quantitative and qualitative parameters, helping researchers make knowledgeable decisions that ensure future experiments are better, faster and more cost-effective.

Bioz Stars benefit researchers who are searching for products to use in their experiments, and vendors of life science tools who can view their product ratings.

Silicon Valley Startup Closes $3 Million in Funding

As part of today's announcement, Bioz also disclosed $3 million in seed funding, led by 5AM Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm focused on building next-generation life science companies. Stanford-StartX Fund, Astia Angels and other institutional and individual investors, including Esther Dyson, well-known journalist, author, investor and philanthropist, also invested in the round. The funding will be used for platform development, building the Bioz user base, increasing global awareness and growing the business.

Bioz is the world's first and only cloud search engine built for life science experimentation. Bioz is available free to researchers and is currently in beta. For more information, visit www.bioz.com.

Supporting Quotes

"The market opportunity for Bioz is huge", said Andrew Schwab, founder and managing partner of 5AM Ventures. "We see Bioz filling a significant gap in the life science ecosystem and we're excited to be on this journey with them to revolutionize how researchers select reagents, consumables, instruments and equipment, ultimately accelerating drug discovery."

"People think of science experiments as a bit abstract: either you do something right or you do it wrong. But actually, the quality of the tools and the supplies matters greatly. To a scientist, the quality of a tool matters as much as a hotel might to a traveler", said Esther Dyson, a Bioz investor. "But until Bioz, there hasn't been any reliable way for a scientist to know what she is getting when she orders supplies."

"Millions of online searches are performed every day by researchers around the world looking to discover the next big disease cure, said Professor Gary Wilcox, a Bioz investor, and a developer of Cialis. Bioz revolutionizes search technology and delivers information in a way that focuses on the researcher. Bioz is like no other search tool, as it structures scientific data in an extremely useful way.

"Historically, researchers have been bound to combing through countless academic papers when embarking on new research projects", said Professor Roger Kornberg, Nobel Laureate and Scientific Advisor to Bioz. "Bioz represents the future and drastically reduces research time. What's more, no other platform on the market today provides an unbiased product rating system to help researchers plan experiments. The Bioz platform and Bioz Stars will not only change the way researchers approach experimentation, but will affect society as a whole given a speedier drug discovery process."

"What previously took me months to find when working on a new experiment, I found in mere minutes with Bioz", said Stanford Professor Giles Plant, an early Bioz user.