Part 1 in the "What is HoX?" series
It's become clear from the questions I get that HoX is an odd duck. So, I wanted to write a series detailing our business, our platform, and our purpose.
What We Sell
We sell three things, all built on a common platform:
Scientific & Clinical Services. You send us samples. We sequence them, run analyses, and deliver the reports you care about, but we also load everything into a warehouse you can query. We call this sample-to-exploration.
Most sequencing vendors hand you files and walk away. We don't. Every sample you've ever sent us lives in your searchable database. Order a new batch, and it joins the old ones. Run a query across all of them, or revisit an experiment from six months ago with a new question.
SPLICE, launching next week, is our first public service. Full-length RNA sequencing with the goal of scaling splice variant profiling. All services are currently research use only. Over time, we'll move into clinical tests that integrate with health records, and expand beyond sequencing into imaging.
Software Applications. We build apps like our genomics viewer on top of the platform. They share a common data model, so multiple applications can access the same data seamlessly. Apps come bundled with services or as standalone subscriptions.
We currently charge seat-based fees and require you to contact us for access. As the OS matures (more on that below), we'll move toward usage-based pricing and open sign-up.
Solutions. High-complexity contracts and deep strategic work. Government and industry often face a procurement problem. Work is often complex, order volume is low, and outcomes are poor. We leverage our platform to make the work less complex, allowing us to execute quickly and at lower cost.
This can mean custom software, biobank management, sample-to-answer devices, or all of those combined. This work often results in new commercial products, giving way to a dual-use strategy. As you may already know, we've started in biodefense, partnering with the USG. You can read more about it in our press release🔗.
The Purpose
Our bioeconomy depends on scientific and clinical services. For it to remain competitive, these sectors need to shift from slow and labor-driven to scalable and software-driven. This transition is happening, but slowly, and our purpose is to accelerate it by bringing software economics to this sector. By software economics, we mean near-zero marginal cost, easy composability, and the ability to scale without scaling headcount.
We think the best way to do this is to bring as many services as possible onto one platform. A one-stop shop where you can order thousands of services from a single interface, with results joined automatically into a searchable system ready for software to reason about.
To build this, we created an internal system we call the OS. Everything we sell runs on it. Think of it as programmable lab and data infrastructure. We can deploy it at different scales and locations, from portable devices to exascale facilities, and use it to create and deploy services and applications quickly.
For this to work, the OS needs to add new offerings at marginal cost. That means we need to continuously reduce the complexity of scientific and engineering labor. In the limit, this means the OS needs to become autonomous.
Right now, our tactics are to leverage our control of the full stack to deliver high-complexity work, reinvest that money into the OS, and make the next project lower-complexity. Each cycle, the OS gets smarter and the labor required shrinks. We repeat until high-complexity work is cheap. Along the way, we release services and software.
Over time, our software and robotics will mature to the point of the OS being a proper, programmable platform. You could program your own service or application, or ask a model to generate one for you. We've designed the OS so that its subsystems can all be operated by text, which opens up the possibility of a scientific workflow operated entirely by models. Maybe, in the limit, models operate most of what we now call the services economy.
In summary. We sell software applications, sample-to-exploration services, and high-complexity solutions. We focus heavily on the solutions, reinvesting the work and money into the OS to make the next project less complex. We repeat until high-complexity work is cheap, releasing services and applications along the way. In the limit, the OS should help shift life sciences from a slow, labor-driven economy to a scalable, software-driven one.
