Imagene Labs

Imagene Labs does not want to be the DNA test you remember. It wants to be the science inside the ones you already buy. Founded in 2016 by Dr Mun Yew Wong - a medical doctor who spent years as a venture capitalist before building his own company - the firm runs an enterprise-grade, cloud-based genetic analytics platform that other businesses license to create personalized products.

The pitch is straightforward. A customer provides a saliva sample. Imagene Labs' platform reads the relevant genetic markers and, through a patented layer of ancestry-based risk analytics, translates them into practical insight: which nutrients a body processes well, how skin ages, which forms of exercise suit a given genotype. Brands in fitness, beauty and nutrition then turn those readouts into products and advice.

What separates the company from the wave of consumer DNA kits is less the sequencing than the reference data behind it. Most large genomic datasets were built on populations of European descent. Imagene Labs built its models on ethnically-relevant reference data tuned for Asian genomes - a quiet but consequential decision, because a genetic result only means something in the context of the population it is compared against.

That focus earned the company a United States patent - No. 10,468,141 - for ancestry-based genetic risk analytics, and a string of regional recognitions, including Frost & Sullivan's 2017 award for entrepreneurial company of the year in personalized wellness genomics.

The consumer face of the platform is Ori, a name that nods to "origin." Under it sit three families of tests - fitness (Ori FIT), skincare (Ori SKIN) and nutrition (Ori VIT) - along with a combined panel, OriLIFE+. Behind the brand is a bioinformatics service that reaches further still, covering healthy aging and longevity, allergies, sports performance, children's traits and even personality.

The market Imagene Labs is aiming at is enormous and noisy. Founder Dr Wong has described the wellness industry as a multi-trillion-dollar arena where consumers waste money on products that were never designed for their bodies. His answer is to let genetics, rather than marketing, decide what belongs in the cart.

Imagene Labs earns primarily through B2B and B2B2C channels. It licenses its analytics platform and bioinformatics services to fitness, beauty, nutrition and healthcare brands, which then sell DNA-personalized products under their own names. Watsons Malaysia's "Truly Yours" wellness DNA range, launched in 2020, is a public example of the model at work.

Alongside that, the company reaches consumers directly through Ori-branded tests. The two channels reinforce each other: Ori demonstrates the science in market, while the platform scales it across partner brands. The affiliation with Asia Genomics - which operates a Singapore Ministry of Health-licensed genetics lab - provides the clinical testing backbone.

Capital came early and from notable names. In June 2018, Imagene Labs closed a Series A+ round led by Silicon Valley's Formation 8, with K2 Global and Singapore billionaire Ron Sim also participating. The amount was not disclosed.

Handling genetic data invites obvious scrutiny, and the company has leaned into it: Imagene Labs is compliant with Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act and holds the Data Protection Trustmark awarded by the Infocomm Media Development Authority.