23andMe, a personal genetics company based in Mountain View, Calif., has raised more than $50 million in a Series D financing. Participants in the financing include Yuri Milner, a new investor, as well as existing investors Sergey Brin, 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki, New Enterprise Associates, Google Ventures and MPM Capital. This investment will help the company achieve its growth goal of one million customers.

The Series D investment, combined with rapidly decreasing costs associated with genetic testing technologies, enables 23andMe to reduce the price of its personal genome service to $99, effective immediately. The company will continue to evaluate optimal pricing strategies.

The investment also enables 23andMe to expand the necessary infrastructure to support growth in its research and operational capabilities, including product development, genetic research, software development, recruitment and marketing.

23andMe's goal is to revolutionize health and wellness by serving one million individuals. The funding will accelerate 23andMe's ability to create a powerful platform that enables researchers around the globe to make meaningful discoveries significantly faster than is currently possible. With this expansion, 23andMe, which currently has more than 180,000 customers, will aim to:

•     Enable groundbreaking research by creating an exponentially larger collective of actively engaged, genotyped individuals;
•     Help accelerate development of new treatments;
•     Improve understanding of wellness and disease prevention; and
•     Broaden access for people seeking to manage their health and well-being through direct access and greater understanding of their own genetic data.

"This financing represents our next step toward empowering one million individuals to approach their wellness in a completely different, personalized way. This is the beginning of a new era of health that is focused on affordable preventative care and personalized medicine," said Wojcicki.

She added, "A community of one million actively engaged individuals will be transformational for research. A community of this magnitude will improve researchers' ability to quickly answer questions about genetic function and the role of environmental factors. In addition, it will enable researchers to understand medication efficacy and side effects, in both medications that exist today and medications are that are in development.”