Seqera Labs

About Seqera Labs

Seqera Labs, a Barcelona-based company founded in 2018, provides solutions for orchestrating data analysis pipelines, particularly in the life sciences and bioinformatics sectors. The company originated as a spin-off from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), founded by Paolo Di Tommaso and Evan Floden. The foundation of Seqera Labs is built upon Nextflow, an open-source workflow orchestration software created by Di Tommaso in 2013 to address challenges he and his colleagues faced with managing complex, large-scale biomedical data analyses. Floden, with a Ph.D. in Biomedicine and experience at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, joined the Nextflow project during his doctoral studies at CRG, where he and Di Tommaso worked in the same lab. Their shared experience in tackling the computational hurdles of genomics research fueled the creation of the company several years after Nextflow's inception, as they recognized a growing demand from pharmaceutical companies and a clear market opportunity.

The company's business model is centered around its commercial product, Seqera Tower, which serves as a centralized command post for managing Nextflow pipelines. While the core Nextflow technology remains open-source and free, fostering a large user community, Seqera generates revenue by offering Tower as an enterprise-grade solution. This product provides organizations with enhanced features for collaboration, monitoring, and deploying data-intensive applications at scale, either on-premises or in the cloud. Seqera primarily serves clients in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and genomics industries, including major players like AstraZeneca, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Oxford Nanopore. Their software helps scientists and developers manage unwieldy amounts of data, such as sequencing data, for applications ranging from pathogenic surveillance and personalized medicine to AI-based drug discovery.

Seqera Labs has achieved significant financial milestones, securing $5.5 million in seed funding in 2021 from investors including Talis Capital and Speedinvest, with a notable grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. This was followed by a substantial €22 million (approximately $21.7M) Series A round in 2022 led by Addition Capital. In May 2025, the company announced a $26 million Series B round, also led by Addition, to further its platform development. These funding rounds support the company's expansion, particularly in North America, which accounts for over 70% of its customer base. The company's technology played a recognized role during the COVID-19 pandemic by enabling public health authorities to rapidly scale genomic surveillance and identify new variants.