Quilt Data

Quilt Data, Inc., founded in 2015 by Kevin Moore and Aneesh Karve, provides a specialized data management platform designed for the life sciences sector. The founders, who met as computer science graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005, combined their expertise to address the complex data challenges in biotech. Kevin Moore, the CEO, is a computer architect with a Ph.D. specializing in transactional memory and has prior experience at Sun Microsystems and Oracle Labs. CTO Aneesh Karve holds degrees in chemistry, mathematics, and computer science, with a background that includes roles at Microsoft and NVIDIA, as well as experience in proteomics and machine learning.

The company operates in the biotech, pharmaceutical, and agricultural technology markets, serving both computational biologists and wet-lab scientists. Quilt's core mission is to help these organizations treat data as a compounding asset rather than a disposable resource, which is critical as AI and machine learning become more integral to research. Revenue is generated through a tiered subscription model, including pay-as-you-go and enterprise plans, which offer varying levels of features, support, and connectivity to Amazon S3 buckets.

The firm's main offering is the Quilt Data Platform, a cloud-native solution that runs within a client's own AWS environment. This platform functions as a centralized data hub, or data mesh, that transforms scattered research data into versioned, auditable, and compliant assets. A key feature is the use of "Quilt Data Packages," which bundle data with its corresponding metadata, lineage, and documentation into a single, immutable unit. This structure ensures that data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), and supports compliance with standards like GxP, HIPAA, and GDPR. The platform consists of a web-based catalog for data visualization and search, a Python SDK for programmatic access and workflow automation, and integrations with tools like Nextflow, electronic lab notebooks (ELNs), and Amazon HealthOmics.

Keywords: data management, life sciences, biotech data, pharmaceutical data, AWS, data versioning, data catalog, FAIR data, computational biology, scientific data management, data mesh, cloud data platform, reproducible research, data governance, bioinformatics, genomics data, drug discovery, R&D data, clinical data management, laboratory data, agtech