Transinsight gets €500,000 seed investment from German High Tech Gründer Fonds

The German government-sponsored High-Tech Gründer Fonds has made a seed investment in Dresden-based startup Transinsight, a company that says it has developed a more intelligent search engine for the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. The High Tech Gründer Fonds, which only invests alongside other investors, put  €500,000 into Transinsight. The company declined to disclose the remaining investment amount.

Transinsight’s software combines GoPubMed.org, a biotech search engine, with a database of 19,000 Gene Ontology terms that define and categorize molecular biology terms. The search tools were developed at the Technical University of Dresden by Andreas Doms and Michael Schroeder. Although no patents have yet been filed, Transinsight has exclusive rights to the underlying software for five years, and Schroeder serves as the company’s Chief Scientific Officer.

The company says its search software will enable researchers to find more relevant answers to their queries, thus speeding up the entire process. “Researchers in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries spend an average of 12.4 hours a week searching for relevant information,” says Michael Alvers, CEO of Transinsight. “This is designed to loosen that bottleneck.”  After coming up with numerous article abstracts via the GoPubMed search engine, users can query the Gene Ontology database to refine the search. Halvers says the company has a first corporate customer in the U.K. but would not disclose revenues.

The deal is the fourth investment by the €262 million High Tech Gründer Fonds, established in August by the German government in cooperation with BASF, Deutsche Telekom and Siemens. The fund provides seed investments of €500,000 to R&D based startups in their earliest stages.