Tempus Attracts $200M in Series F Financing, Bringing Total Raised to $510M

Tempus Attracts $200M in Series F Financing, Bringing Total Raised to $510M
Credit: © Orlando Florin Rosu/Fotolia

Tempus, a precision medicine technology company focused on collecting and analyzing molecular and clinical data, has raised $200 million in Series F financing, bringing its total capital raised to more than a half-billion dollars.

The company said it has raised $520 million since it was founded in September 2015. Just last year, Tempus completed a $110 million Series E financing round. Tempus says its valuation has grown to $3.1 billion, from $2 billion last year.

“From our founding, Tempus has been singularly focused on improving the lives of patients diagnosed with disease, starting with cancer,” Eric Lefkofsky, Tempus’ founder and CEO, said in a statement.

“Three and a half years later, we are empowering stakeholders across healthcare with insights derived from real-world clinical evidence connected to rich molecular data,” Lefkofsky added. “We are humbled by the industry response thus far and remain committed to delivering on the promise of precision medicine to improve patient care.”

Citing rapid growth, Tempus said it will use the additional capital to further enhance operations and accelerate its expansion into new therapeutic areas and geographies. The Chicago-based company told Crain’s Chicago Business it will expand its work beyond oncology, into diabetes and depression.

Tempus is seeking to build the world’s largest library of molecular and clinical data, as well as an operating system to collect, sort, and analyze that data, to improve its accessibility and utility to physicians.

To those ends, Tempus has partnered with top-tier academic medical centers, NCI-designated cancer centers, hospital networks, physicians, and researchers. NYU School of Medicine and the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy are two clinical partners that launched collaborations with Tempus last year. The company’s other collaboration partners have included the University of Chicago Medicine and Biological Sciences (focused on breast cancer), University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Center (immunotherapies), University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center (ovarian and triple negative breast cancer), University of Michigan (breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, and commercialization of U-M’s MI-ONCOSEQ cancer panel), and Duke University School of Medicine (brain cancer).

In addition to working with hospital systems—including nearly half of all academic medical centers in the U.S.—and independent oncologists, Tempus is partnering with Precision Health AI and CancerLinQ, a wholly owned nonprofit subsidiary of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), in a collaboration launched in December 2017 to accelerate development and delivery of high-quality, de-identified clinical databases.

Tempus says its platform now serves more than 1 in 4 cancer patients in the U.S. The company told Crain’s Chicago Business it will expand its work beyond oncology, into diabetes and depression.

The latest financing round attracted investors that include Baillie Gifford, Franklin Templeton, NEA, Novo Holdings, Revolution Growth, and funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price.

Robert Ghenchev, a Director in the Principal Investments team of Novo Holdings, will be joining Tempus’s Board of Directors.