Cork’s Helixworks named among 50 finalists for SXSW Accelerator Pitch event

26 Jan 2017

Skyline of Austin, Texas. Image: RoschetzkyProductions/Shutterstock

Helixworks, the Cork-based DNA data storage start-up, has been named among the 50 finalists for the ninth annual SXSW Accelerator Pitch event taking place in March.

In the past few years, Ireland has had an increasing presence at the annual SXSW conference in the US, most notably last year when people from business, research and culture descended on Austin, Texas to show what the country has to offer.

In 2017, many of these will return again, but an additional win for Irish start-ups came with the announcement that Cork-based DNA data storage company Helixworks was named in the final 50 of the SXSW Accelerator Pitch.

New device turns data into DNA in real time

The start-up was founded from the IndieBio EU accelerator (now called RebelBio) and is led by Nimesh Chandra, who said the company plans to launch a new machine that it has developed, called MOSS 2.0.

According to Chandra, the machine is capable of transforming digital data into DNA in real time and will “break barriers in the speed of DNA synthesis”.

He added: “At SXSW, we will demonstrate, live to our audience and also at the expo floor, a biotech product that is going to cross the barriers of our understanding of biology, our understanding of science – everything. This is going to be a plug-and-play machine with a drag-and-drop user interface.”

Back in July, the company made headlines after it announced that it was the first company in the world to offer DNA data storage to anyone, straight from Amazon.

By purchasing DNA Drive, a person can store 512KB of data onto genetic information that is stored in a golden pill, which could potentially last for thousands of years.

“If you had something like DNA, which is really tiny and very easy to store, [the data] could technically survive a nuclear blast inside a capsule,” Chandra said to Siliconrepublic.com at the time. “All of these things make it really long-term.”

Congrats @Helixworks from Cork on selection as finalists for @sxsw Accelerator Pitch Event! See you in Austin in March! @EI_theUSA https://t.co/l9YoJvnhO6

— Irish Consulate (@IrelandCGAustin) January 25, 2017

Only Irish start-up selected

Helixworks is not the only company looking into the technology, as Microsoft revealed last year that it had purchased 10m strands of DNA to develop new methods of data storage.

Of the 50 start-ups to join the accelerator pitch event taking place on 11 and 12 March this year, Helixworks is the only one to originate from Ireland.

Once all of the start-ups have pitched their companies to a panel of judges and a live audience, one start-up will be selected as the winner of each of the 10 categories and will be included in the SXSW Accelerator.

The full list of companies and where they come from are as follows: