User:GJSissons/sandbox/seqera-labs

Seqera Labs is a developer of software products spun out of the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRC) in Barcelona, Spain. Its core products Nextflow and Nextflow Tower are widely used in the life sciences sector with most users being in academia, research, biotech, and pharma.

History
Nextflow, The open-source software effort behind Seqera Labs, started with researchers from the bioinformatics and genomics research group at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Spain in 2010. The core developer of Nextflow was Paolo Di Tommaso, later joined by Evan Floden. Cédric Notredame, author of T-Coffee, and the principal investigator of the group where the Nextflow effort was born, also had a significant influence on the project. Nextflow had its first open-resource release on GitHub in 2013.

Nextflow quickly rose to prominence and gathered a large user base. To support the project, Seqera Labs was founded in July of 2018 by Evan Floden and Paolo Di Tommaso. Seqera Labs received private pre-seed funding in February of 2019, and raised $5.5 million in seed funding in September 2020. In March of 2022, Seqera Labs announced that it had attracted 50 commercial clients and realized over 800% YoY growth in recurring revenue.

Software and services
Seqera Labs software is used by a variety of organizations including public and private research institutions, pharmaceutical companies, biotech start-ups, and healthcare organizations engaged in research and clinical care. Seqera Lab’s primary products are Nextflow and Nextflow Tower.

While the software can be used to support many types of scientific workflow, Seqera Lab’s products are mainly used to analyze large amounts of sequenced genomics data. Applications for the software include pathogenic surveillance, personalized immunotherapies, and personalized vaccines.

Nextflow
Nextflow is a software offering designed to build reproducible, data-drive computational pipelines. Alternative software tools that provided similar functionality include Snakemake, Apache Airflow, and Common Workflow Language (CWL). Since Nextflow was originally published to GitHub in 2013, there have been steady improvements to the platform and approximately 200 releases.

As of February 2022, Seqera Labs estimates that over 10,000 scientists, engineers and developers are actively using Nextflow and reading Nextflow documentation each month. Today, Seqera Labs are the primary developers of open source Nextflow. Nextflow is freely available under an Apache 2.0 license from nextflow.io. There are multiple companion offerings to open source Nextflow available from the Nextflow GitHub repository including various sample genomics pipelines and plug-ins that extend the functionality of the Nextflow platform.

Nextflow Tower
In September of 2019, Seqera Labs announced the release of their first commercial product, Nextflow Tower. Nextflow Tower is a web-based that makes it easy for Nextflow users to collaborate on data analysis at scale. The software enables users to easily launch, manage, and monitor Nextflow data analysis pipelines and compute environments. The software can be deployed on-premises or in a customer’s preferred cloud environment. A hosted version of Tower is available at tower.nf where users can create an account and bring their own cloud credentials to get started with the platform.

Community
Nextflow enjoys a fast growing user community. In a recent survey of Nextflow users, over 80% of users have been using the software for three years or less. Nf-core is a community effort to collect a curated set of analysis pipelines built using Nextflow. At present, there are 440 members of the Nf-core GitHub organization and 1,242 contributors. 66 pipelines have been developed as a part of the nf-core effort along with 516 modules that can be used as building blocks for other pipelines. The Nf-core organization runs regular virtual in person events including regular Bytesize conferences and hackathons.

The nf-core project was started by Phil Ewels, then head of the development facility at NGI Stockholm (National Genomics Infrastructure ), part of SciLifeLab in Sweden. In March of 2022, Phil Ewels announced that he is joining Seqera Labs where he will continue to be involved with nf-core.