BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ginkgo
Bioworks, an organism design company, today announced that it has
raised $9 million in a Series A round from Felicis Ventures, OS Fund,
Data Collective, iGlobe Partners and Vast Ventures. The company was part
of Y Combinator’s Summer 2014 class and was the first biotech startup to
participate in Y Combinator’s accelerator program.
“Ginkgo is at the intersection of industrial design and biology. Today,
our organism engineers work directly with customers to design microbes
for their specific needs in the nutrition, health and consumer goods
sectors, but our technology can be applied to a multitude of
industries”
Ginkgo Bioworks also announced the opening of its new 18,000
square-foot, automated organism engineering foundry, Bioworks1.
Bioworks1 uses robotics and advanced software to make the process of
engineering organisms scalable. The company used their new investment
round to complete the construction of Bioworks1 and will use the funding
to operate the foundry to deliver organisms to customers. They have
already begun the design of their next-generation foundry, Bioworks2,
slated for construction in early 2017.
“Ginkgo is at the intersection of industrial design and biology. Today,
our organism engineers work directly with customers to design microbes
for their specific needs in the nutrition, health and consumer goods
sectors, but our technology can be applied to a multitude of
industries,” said Jason Kelly, Co-founder, Ginkgo Bioworks. “Lab work
that previously required an army of PhDs is now being automated and
scaled in our foundry.”
Ginkgo Bioworks specializes in engineering microbes to produce cultured
ingredients, such as flavors, fragrances, cosmetics, and nutritional
ingredients. The company has secured 20 organism design contracts to
date with customers including Fortune 500 companies.
“Biology will be one of the most defining and revolutionary technologies
of the coming decades and will reinvent multiple industries from
healthcare to energy,” said Bryan Johnson, Founder, OS Fund. “Ginkgo
Bioworks has a world-class team of engineers building the tools and
infrastructure that will allow us to use biology to address global
challenges for generations to come.”
Ginkgo previously secured over $15 million in contracts from DARPA and
other advanced research government agencies to fund the development and
successful demonstration of their foundry’s core technology such as
automating the writing of DNA code.
“At Felicis Ventures, we invest in companies with groundbreaking
frontier technologies and we believe Ginkgo has developed and de-risked
a tool chain that begins to make designing biology as easy as writing
software,” said Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Director, Felicis
Ventures.
Ginkgo Bioworks was founded in 2008 by Tom Knight, a renowned computer
scientist and the “godfather” of synthetic biology, along with MIT
graduates Jason Kelly, Reshma Shetty, Barry Canton and Austin Che.
About Ginkgo Bioworks
Ginkgo Bioworks is an organism design company that is building organisms
to spec for customers across markets including nutrition, health and
consumer goods. The company’s organism engineers work directly with
customers including Fortune 500 companies to design microbes for their
specific needs. The company was founded in 2008 by Tom Knight, a
world-renowned computer scientist, as well as MIT engineering PhD
graduates Jason Kelly, Reshma Shetty, Barry Canton and Austin Che.
Ginkgo Bioworks is based in Boston and is financially backed by Felicis
Ventures, OS Fund, Data Collective, Y Combinator, iGlobe Partners, and
Vast Ventures as well as other angel investors and funds.