Riffyn secured $1.8 million in seed financing round led by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, with additional investments from Bioeconomy Capital and others. The company provides experimental process design and analytics software to improve reproducibility and tech transfer in life science, chemical and materials research and development.

“Reproducibility in research has long been a barrier to science-driven impact” said Tim O’Reilly, general partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. “We see many exciting parallels between Riffyn’s approach to life science and materials research, and the game-changing analytics and continuous deployment techniques of software development.”

Segments of the scientific community presently suffer from reproducibility rates as low as 10% on published research due to uncontrolled experimental noise. Such noise is hindering the advancement of scientific knowledge, contributing to unpredictable product development timelines and underlying multi-million dollar failures in technology transfer to clinical trials or manufacturing. Riffyn’s software aims to dramatically reduce such noise and increase the returned value from more than $400 billion invested globally each year in life science and materials R&D.

The core of Riffyn’s product is an experimental process design, data acquisition and analytics engine that provides manufacturing-grade quality improvement capabilities via a visual interface. This engine delivers scientific insights by exposing trends and causal relationships between experimental variables. The software also provides the design flexibility and collaboration tools needed to continuously innovate.

The company will use the funds to advance its product to beta release in summer 2015 and commercial launch in late 2015.