CATALOG, an automated DNA-based digital data storage company, has secured $35 million in Series B funding led by Hanwha Impact Partners. This funding will spur the development of a computing platform where both data management and computation occur through the manipulation of synthetic DNA.

In addition, CATALOG will use the funding to help create an ecosystem of collaborators, partners, and users of DNA-based computing. CATALOG will continue active involvement in the DNA Storage Alliance to help the industry grow and establish standards around DNA storage and eventually computation.

CATALOG has also discovered the means to incorporate DNA into algorithms and applications with potential widespread commercial use through its proprietary data encoding scheme and novel approach to automation. Expected areas of early application are artificial intelligence, machine learning, data analytics, and secure computing. In addition, initial use cases are expected to include fraud detection in financial services, image processing for defect discovery in manufacturing, and digital signal processing in the energy sector.

CATALOG’s first DNA writer, Shannon, was named in honor of the father of information theory, Claude Shannon. It is capable of hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions per second. Future versions of CATALOG’s automated DNA-based data platform will introduce computational capabilities in addition to storage. This will be the first commercially viable and automated DNA storage and computation platform for enterprise use.