MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Clear Labs, the world’s first food analytics platform for retailers and manufacturers, today announced that it has raised $13 million in Series B funding. The new round was led by Wing VC, with participation from Google Ventures, Tencent, Khosla Ventures, and Felicis Ventures. The company also announced that Michael R. Taylor, former FDA Deputy Commissioner for Foods and Veterinary Medicine, has joined the company’s Board of Directors to help foster the application of advanced genomic technologies to improve food safety.
The company will use the funding to advance its software offerings, continue to build out its family of NGS food tests, and expand its commercial operations.
Clear Labs uses proprietary Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) techniques to help retailers and manufacturers protect their brands and their supply chains, and ensure the highest standards of food safety and quality. The company’s proprietary analytics pipeline is able to translate quantifiable molecular tests into actionable information for food brands who use Clear Labs’ family of tests for the detection of food safety threats, quality assurance and new product development. The NGS workflow is built on Clear Labs’ proprietary molecular food database, which is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the world.
“Our mission is to help our customers mitigate risk through data-driven intelligence,” said Sasan Amini, CEO and co-founder of Clear Labs. “Both our family of NGS-based food tests and software analytics offerings have huge implications for the scalability and accessibility of food safety and quality measures. This new funding will help us reach food companies on a global scale.”
On the heels of the Series B funding, Clear Labs also welcomes Michael Taylor to their Board of Directors. Taylor brings 30 years of food safety experience to Clear Labs, most recently at the FDA where he led implementation of the Food Safety Modernization Act, the most sweeping food safety reform the industry has seen to date.
“Technologies like next-generation sequencing are already being used by government and industry to investigate and respond to food safety problems,” said Michael Taylor, former FDA Deputy Commissioner for Foods and Clear Labs board member. “As costs go down and speed goes up, it’s only a matter of time before NGS will be applied more broadly to improve food safety management systems and prevent safety problems. I’m excited to join the Clear Labs Board and work with the food industry on ways that the rapidly advancing NGS testing and data analytical tools can be applied to build more safe and secure supply chains.”
Now, Taylor is a senior fellow at Freedman Consulting LLC, in Washington D.C., where he expands his focus to food security as well as food safety. He also serves as an advisor to the Aspen Institute’s Food and Society Program.
“The food industry is hungry for a more scalable and sustainable method to monitor and secure their complex supply chains,” said Mahni Ghorashi, co-founder of Clear Labs. “Our new round of funding and the addition of Mike to our Board of Directors will realize NGS as the industry standard of food safety testing technology around the world.”
The Clear Labs Board of Directors is made up of leading scientists and industry leaders in the fields of life sciences, enterprise software and food safety. Taylor joins Gaurav Garg, Nick Roelofs, Mostafa Ronaghi, and Sasan Amini.
To learn more about Clear Labs, please visit: www.clearlabs.com.
About Clear Labs
Clear Labs is the world’s first food analytics platform for retailers and manufacturers. We join advanced molecular diagnostics with data science to help leading food companies protect their brands and ensure the highest standards of food quality. Our mission is to drive unprecedented transparency and to mitigate risk through data-driven intelligence.
Our platform enables our customers to determine the objective quality and safety of their products, assess and reduce risks of contamination and recalls, streamline food safety programs, and eliminate blind spots throughout their supply chains.
Clear Labs was founded in 2013 by a group of software engineers, genomic scientists, and food-industry experts to secure the world's food supply and set worldwide standards for food integrity.
Learn more about Clear Labs at www.ClearLabs.com.