What Metalife does

Metalife AG is a German bioinformatics company headquartered in Winden im Elztal (Black Forest region) that develops integrative bioknowledge software for the life-sciences industry, including pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and research institutions. The company was founded in 2000 by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Michael Schönemann under the auspices of the Meta Foundation in Dornbirn, Austria, with early computational backing from Microsoft and Intel. Metalife AG is structured as a German Aktiengesellschaft (AG) governed by an Executive Board (Samira Schönemann) and a Supervisory Board chaired by Claus Escher.

The company's core offering is Metalife Trinity, a modular bioinformatics suite comprising Metalife Explorer (BioExplorer, High-Value Sequence Repository, and Gene Nominator), Metalife Predictor (Genome Comparison Tool and Job Designer with access to 140+ algorithms), and Metalife Analyzer (Recognition Tool and MetaText). The platform integrates data from over 80 public databases and applies approximately 30 ontology-based vocabularies for text mining of biomedical literature, supporting gene/protein dossier compilation, large-scale sequence and genome comparison, custom pipeline design, and extraction of relationships such as disease-drug associations. Complementary products include PhenomicDB, a multi-organism phenotype-genotype database spanning human, mouse, fruit fly, C. elegans, and other model organisms, and Drug2Gene, which reports gene/protein-drug/compound relationships.

Metalife generates revenue through subscription-based licensing of the Metalife Trinity platform and professional services engagements for custom software development, which the company has offered since 2000. The go-to-market motion is direct-contact enterprise sales — prospective customers reach Metalife AG Germany directly for pricing and access — with no public pricing disclosed. In 2024, Metalife announced two adjacent platform initiatives outside its core bioinformatics line: Metauniverse.com, a coaching marketplace, and Metaact.com, listed as undergoing redesign. No external venture or growth equity funding has been disclosed, and revenue figures are not publicly reported.

Name

Metalife

Legal name

Metalife AG

Website

https://metalife.com

Company type

Private

Founded year

2000

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Metalife AG is a German bioinformatics company that develops Metalife Trinity, an integrative bioknowledge software suite for life-sciences organizations, combining data integration across 80+ databases, 140+ bioinformatics algorithms, and ontology-driven text mining of biomedical literature, sold via licensing and custom development.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Bioinformatics Software

SIC

Services-Commercial Physical & Biological Research (8731)

akta.pro primary industry

Scientific Data Management & Data Platforms (SDMS/Data Lakehouse for R&D) (HLAGAJAC)

akta.pro secondary industries

Knowledge Management & Scientific Collaboration / Literature Intelligence (HLAGAJAN), Regulatory Information Management (RIM) & Submission Publishing Software (HLAGAJAL)

Keywords

• Bioinformatics software
• Life science analytics
• Genomic data integration
• Biomedical text mining
• Pharmaceutical research databases

Headquarters

HQ city

Stuttgart

HQ country

Germany

HQ region

Europe

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Personnel, Operations, Marketing or Sales

Revenue model

1. Metalife Trinity Licenses: Professional standard bioinformatics software solution sold to life science organizations. The adaptive core allows customization to meet specific organizational needs.
2. Custom Software Development: Since 2000, Metalife develops custom software tools from scratch in collaborative and interactive processes with customers and partners.

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels1 record

Marketing channels1 record

Core offering

Metalife develops and licenses Metalife Trinity, a comprehensive bioinformatics suite that combines semantic data integration, text mining, and algorithmic analysis to help life science organizations activate and analyze biological information from public and proprietary sources. The company also maintains specialized databases (PhenomicDB and Drug2Gene) and offers custom software development services for life science R&D workflows.

Product overview

Metalife offers a unified bioinformatics platform architecture centered on Metalife Trinity as the core product suite, supplemented by specialized databases PhenomicDB and Drug2Gene. Metalife Trinity comprises three integrated components: Metalife Explorer (providing BioExplorer for gene/protein dossier compilation, High-Value Sequence Repository for pharmaceutical content management, and Gene Nominator for entry evaluation), Metalife Predictor (offering Genome Comparison Tool and Job Designer for pipeline automation), and Metalife Analyzer (featuring Recognition Tool and MetaText for text mining). The company also develops platforms including Metauniverse.com (coaching marketplace) and Metaact.com.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Metalife Trinity

Quantifiable outcome

• Over 99% of cellular processes and entire organisms remain unexplored, representing the market opportunity Metalife addresses

Named customers1 record

Segments1 record

Ideal customer profiles1 record

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

AI capability6 records

Feature8 records

Partnerships

One partnership is on record.

• German Life Sciences CompaniescoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerEvery major life sciences company in Germany has embraced the Meta Foundation vision and is actively participating in the initial phase of the Metalife Project, representing the cooperative network set to expand internationally.

Scale indicators4 records

Recent moves5 records

Expansion highlights4 records

Direct peers

• Genedata: Genedata provides enterprise bioinformatics and scientific data management platforms for pharma R&D, including data integration, workflow automation, and analytics — directly comparable to Metalife Trinity's positioning.
• Dotmatics: Dotmatics offers a scientific informatics platform (LIMS, ELN, data management) for life sciences R&D, competing in the same enterprise bioinformatics/software category as Metalife.
• Benchling: Benchling is a cloud-native life sciences R&D platform with ELN, LIMS, and molecular biology tools, competing for the same bioinformatics and data management workloads as Metalife Trinity.
• Geneious (Biomatters): Geneious provides bioinformatics software for sequence analysis, genome comparison, and pipeline design, overlapping directly with Metalife's Predictor component (BLAST-based comparison, Job Designer).
• DNASTAR: DNASTAR delivers bioinformatics software for sequence assembly, annotation, and analysis, similar in scope to Metalife's genome comparison and sequence annotation capabilities.

Broad incumbents

• QIAGEN Digital Insights (CLC bio): QIAGEN's bioinformatics portfolio (incl. CLC bio) is an established enterprise offering for genomic analysis, gene expression, and knowledge bases, competing broadly with Metalife's life science informatics stack.
• BIOVIA (Dassault Systèmes): BIOVIA provides scientific informatics, ELN, and molecular modeling solutions for life sciences as part of Dassault's broader enterprise platform, overlapping with Metalife's data management and analysis capabilities.
• PerkinElmer Informatics (Revvity Signals): Revvity/PerkinElmer's informatics suite offers scientific data management and analytics for pharma R&D, an adjacent broad incumbent competing in similar enterprise bioinformatics deals.
• Clarivate: Clarivate offers life sciences intelligence, literature databases (e.g., Cortellis, Web of Science), and analytics — adjacent to Metalife's text mining and biomedical literature intelligence capabilities.

Emerging players

• Schrödinger: Schrödinger combines computational chemistry and biology platforms for drug discovery, overlapping with Metalife's drug-gene relationship data (Drug2Gene) and life sciences analytics positioning.

Market position

Strengths4 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat4 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles3 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Metalife