SOPHiA GENETICS IPO: A proud day for data-driven medicine

It has been a proud week for the Invoke Capital team. Hot on the heels of Darktrace’s IPO – which has gone from a share price of £2.50 to over £7 in a matter of weeks – I was pleased to see SOPHiA GENETICS, a pioneering genomics business that we backed in 2014, list on the NASDAQ market. 

I recall meeting CEO and Founder, Dr Jurgi Camblong, when it was just a team of five in Lausanne. Jurgi’s vision was clear: improve diagnosis, deliver more personalised treatment and enhance drug development. The Invoke team got involved in 2014 when we led the company’s Series B funding round and I believed then what I still believe now: SOPHiA GENETICS is at the forefront of using machine learning to personalise medicine. Its sophisticated algorithms can provide the clinical accuracy that is required to provide meaningful, targeted therapies.  

Today, SOPHiA’s machine learning platform is deployed in 780 healthcare institutions in over 70 countries around the world. The company’s AI-powered platform has analysed more than 770,000 genomics profiles to help diagnose and treat a spectrum of diseases, from oncology to inherited disorders, cardiac diseases and neurology. 

This movement towards data-driven, personalised medicine is perhaps one of the most important developments of our time. Up until now, medicine has generally worked on a cohort basis, the idea that treatment for a disease such as cancer – which develops and mutates differently in every person’s body – is something that can be applied across most of the population. But that’s not how humans work. We all have very specific differences in our genetic makeup and our phenotypes which cause us to have different reactions to both diseases and drugs. For instance, lung cancer is not one disease, but is actually upwards of 10,000 variants. We must therefore be truly understanding and managing cancer and other life-threatening diseases from a precise and clinical point of view and embracing data-driven technologies. 

For Jurgi and the team, this IPO is a milestone in their journey. And for myself and the Invoke team, two IPO’s in three months is also something to be celebrated. Our first investment, Darktrace, has gone on to see a staggering 200% increase in its share price whilst listed on the London Stock Exchange, and Featurespace has already established itself as the world leader in the application of AI for fraud prevention and anti-money laundering. And that’s not forgetting Luminance, which continues to revolutionise the field of law with its AI-powered document review tool.

While Friday’s IPO marks the end of one chapter for SOPHiA, in many ways it signals the start of another. And whilst it can sometimes take time for markets to respond to companies that are harder to understand, as science continues to progress and the world becomes increasingly data-driven, I have every faith that the best is yet to come for Jurgi and the team.

By Mike Lynch OBE, FREng FRS

Entrepreneur and Founder, Invoke Capital