The financing will enable 23andMe to expand its therapeutics group, further invest in its crowdsourced genetic research platform and expand its customer acquisition program,

A digital healthcare company that wants to expand the consumer market for genetic testing has received some major cash to do so.

23andMe, a personal genomics and biotechnology company based in Mountain View, Calif., has raised $250 million in new expansion funds from a group of investors headed up by Sequoia Capital.

The financing will enable 23andMe to expand its therapeutics group, further invest in its crowdsourced genetic research platform and expand its customer acquisition program, says 23andMe CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcick.

23andMe extracts genetic information about a user’s health, ancestry, and physical traits from saliva kits it mails to consumers. The company has raised has raised a total of $491 million in the last two years.

advertisement

“We have only begun to scratch the surface in direct-to-consumer genetics,” Wojcicki says.

23andMe says it now has more than two million customers genotyped customers. To date, the company also says it has collected 600 million phenotypic data points. Phenotypic is defined as the observable physical or biochemical characteristics of an organism, as determined by both genetic makeup and environmental influences, per Dictionary.com.

Most Americans are interested in using DNA testing to understand more about their health and ancestry, 23andMe claims based on results from a newly concluded national survey.

About 77 percent of consumers know that genetics plays a role in the risk for certain diseases, and about 90 percent of survey respondents say they knew that DNA testing could inform them about their ancestry, says 23andMe.

advertisement

The 23andMe survey of 1,000 consumers also found that 80% of consumers have privacy concerns around DNA testing and about 88% percent don’t know or understand what sort of precautions testing companies take to secure this information. But four out of five respondents, who have not done a genetic test, also note they’d be more willing to take one if they felt certain their privacy was being protected, says 23andMe.

“This (survey) shows a need for improved genetic literacy,” says 23andMe education and academia program manager Thao Do.

Favorite