Case Study: Clear Labs achieves rapid, scalable pathogen testing and 20% lower infrastructure costs with Google Cloud Platform

Clear Labs Disrupting food safety testing with Google Cloud

Clear Labs, a Menlo Park startup that developed Clear Safety—an automated next‑generation sequencing platform for high‑volume food pathogen testing—needed to process terabytes of sequencing data quickly and reliably so enterprise food producers could get results in hours instead of days. The technical challenge was running a complex, compute‑intensive bioinformatics pipeline (alignment, error correction, pattern matching) at scale while keeping costs and operational complexity low.

By building on Google Cloud Platform (Pipelines API, Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL), Clear Labs rapidly deployed a scalable, secure infrastructure that runs its bio‑pipeline efficiently, spins up powerful VMs on demand, and supports open‑source tooling. The result: faster turnaround (accurate results in under 24 hours), the ability to handle terabytes per run, roughly 20% lower infrastructure costs versus a competitor, and easier scaling and management.

Clear Labs

Henrik Gehrmann

Head of Engineering