Seqera

Nextflow was created in 2013 at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona as an open-source framework for writing and running reproducible data-analysis pipelines that move across different infrastructures. Its author is Paolo Di Tommaso; Evan Floden, who joined its development during his PhD at the CRG, is the co-founder who now runs the company as CEO. In 2018 the two founded Seqera (then Seqera Labs) as a CRG spin-off, aiming to build a commercial offering around Nextflow for research and development teams handling large volumes of biological data. Seqera now describes itself as the driving force behind Nextflow, MultiQC and the Seqera Platform, its "intelligent engine for life sciences". The platform brings pipeline orchestration, data, interactive analysis (Studios), optimised cloud and on-premises compute, standardised containers (Wave) and an AI assistant called Co-Scientist into one environment. It is sold as Cloud Basic, Cloud Pro, Enterprise and GxP-Ready deployments, while the engine stays open source: Nextflow, MultiQC and Wave are open projects maintained by the company. In 2024 Seqera acquired tinybio, a New York generative-AI bioinformatics startup, to let users run pipelines and analyses in natural language. The commercial track record is visible in its funding milestones. In September 2021 it raised a $5.5M seed co-led by Talis Capital and Speedinvest. By March 2022 it reported 50 commercial clients, 8 of them among the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, and ARR growth above 800% in 2021. In October 2022 it closed a €22M Series A led by Addition, citing roughly 400% year-on-year revenue growth, headcount that had tripled in twelve months, and customers including AstraZeneca, Janssen, Oxford Nanopore and Invitae. In May 2025 it announced a $26M Series B, again led by Addition, with Speedinvest, Talis, Amino Collective, BoxOne and SNR. According to its own About page, Seqera today has more than 100 employees, over 150 enterprise customers, an estimated 25,000 Nextflow users, more than 160,000 monthly downloads and over 1,900 open-source contributors. Published customer stories include Genomics England, the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, Color Health and BioSkryb Genomics. The company lists its registered address and European office in Barcelona, with further offices in New York and London. No official revenue or valuation figures were found. Why it matters: Seqera is a rare case of an open-source standard born in European public research and turned into a software infrastructure company for pharma and genomics, a field where reproducibility, compliance and compute cost bear directly on how fast drugs are discovered. The next test is whether it can carry the same model into the era of AI scientific agents.