By Lynda Kiernan
San Francisco-based Foresite Capital has led a $30 million Series B for British synthetic biology company Evonetix.
Foresite leads this round as a new investor, while existing investors Draper Esprit, DCVC (Data Collective), the Morningside group, Providence Investment Company, Cambridge Consultants Ltd, Rising Tide Fund, and Civilization Ventures also participated.
This round follows a $12.3 million Series A in 2018, and a grant from Innovate UK, bringing total funding for the company to-date to $46 million.
Evonetix was founded in 2015 by Cambridge Consultants and tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Hermann Hauser’s Providence Investment Company Limited to develop technology that would enable the parallel synthesis of DNA on silicon arrays. This ability would support the quickly emerging field of synthetic biology where there is growing demand for high-throughput and highly accurate DNA synthesis.
“The next set of breakthroughs in healthcare and synthetic biology will come from technologies that can go beyond reading DNA to writing it,” said Vishal Gulati, venture partner, Draper Esprit. “Evonetix is leveraging the UK’s strength in DNA research to build this unique, ground-breaking DNA synthesis platform. We’re excited to welcome Foresite Capital, one of the world’s leading life-sciences investors, to support this Company to achieve the next stage of its growth and look forward to working closely with this talented team.”
The new capital raised through this Series B will be used by the company to accelerate the development and introduction of a desktop platform for scalable, high-fidelity, and rapid gene synthesis and its technology that will enable the synthesis of DNA on a chip.
“Evonetix is developing a desktop, short latency solution to synthesize DNA,”said Jim Tananbaum, CEO and managing director, Foresite Capital. “We are delighted to support the team in their mission to make biological engineering as accessible and widespread as next-generation sequencing.”
Once the desktop DNA platform is fully developed, it will help facilitate and enable the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology, with applications in agriculture, food, healthcare, pharma, biotech, and data storage.
“DCVC is pleased to continue its commitment to synthetic biology with its renewed investment in Evonetix,” added Armen Vidian, board member of Evonetix and partner at DCVC. “As demand grows to use synthetic biology for everything from sustaining agriculture to creating precision medicines and synthetic fuels, Evonetix will be well-positioned to meet those more complex needs with highly accurate, high throughput, long-strand DNA synthesis.”
The round will also fund the company’s recruitment strategy that will see the significant expansion of its scientific, operations, and commercial teams at its state-of-the-art facility in Cambridge, UK.
“The backing of both our existing and new investors will enable us to fast track development, testing and delivery of our highly parallel desktop platform,” said Dr. Tim Brears, CEO Evonetix, “…which will be available to every researcher to accelerate their ability to use biology on a scale not possible with existing approaches.”
– Lynda Kiernan is Editor with GAI Media and daily contributor to the GAI News and Agtech Intel platforms. If you would like to submit a contribution for consideration, please contact Ms. Kiernan at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.
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