Evonetix announced today that it closed a $30 million Series B funding round as it develops technology for enabling gene synthesis on a chip.
The Cambridge, U.K.-based synthetic biology company said the funding round, led by new investor Foresite Capital, is slated to fund the company through to the introduction of its desktop DNA platform, according to a news release. Existing investors Draper Espirit, DCVC, The Morningside Group, Providence Investment Company, Cambridge Consultants, Rising Tide Fund and Civilization Ventures also participated in the financing.
Evonetix’s DNA platform is designed to facilitate and enable synthetic biology with applications across industries like healthcare, pharma, biotech, food, agriculture and data storage. The silicon chip, made by microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) processing, is supposed to control the synthesis of DNA at thousands of independently controlled reaction sites or “pixels” on the chip surface. After synthesizing, strands are then assembled on-chip into double-stranded DNA in a process designed to identify and remove errors to enable accuracy, scale and speed.
The company, founded in 2015, previously closed a $12.3 million Series A round in 2018, according to the news release. Founded by Cambridge Consultants and Providence Investment Company and backed by venture capitalist Hermann Hauser, Evonetix has now raised $46 million to date.
“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, which will be available to every researcher to accelerate their ability to use biology on a scale not possible with existing approaches,” Evonetix CEO Tim Brears said in the news release.
“The next set of breakthroughs in healthcare and synthetic biology will come from technologies that can go beyond reading DNA to writing it,” added Draper Espirit venture partner Vishal Gulati. “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.”
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