Twist Bioscience, a San Francisco, CA-based company focused on synthetic DNA, completed a $37m Series C financing.
The round was led by Illumina, Inc., with participation from new investors Fidelity Management and Research Company and Foresite Capital Management LLC, as well as all existing investors including Nick and Joby Pritzker (through their family’s firm Tao Invest), ARCH Venture Partners, Paladin Capital Group, Yuri Milner, and additional strategic corporate and venture investors. In conjunction with the financing Nicholas J. Naclerio, Ph.D., Illumina’s senior vice president of corporate development and general manager of enterprise informatics will join the Twist Bioscience board of directors.
The company, which has raised a total of $82.1m, intends to use the funds to accelerate into a beta commercial launch this fall, to pursue strategic opportunities to add product capabilities and services to further enhance the Twist Bioscience user experience.
Led by Emily Leproust, Ph.D., chief executive officer, and Bill Banyai, Ph.D., chief operating officer, Twist Bioscience has developed a proprietary semiconductor-based synthetic DNA manufacturing process featuring a 10,000-well silicon platform capable of producing synthetic biology tools, such as oligonucleotides, genes, pathways, chassis and genomes.
The platform has the potential to accelerate the development of personalized medicine, sustainable chemical production, improved agriculture production as well as new applications such as in vivo diagnostics, biodetection and data storage.
FinSMEs
10/06/2015