On September 19th, Ginkgo Bioworks completed a Series E financing round of $290 million — bringing the company’s total funding to $719 million.
Why We Care: In a company press release, Jason Kelly, CEO and Co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks explains “cells are programmable similar to computers because they run on digital code in the form of DNA.” The company plans to bring biology into every physical goods industry – materials, clothing, electronics, food, pharmaceuticals, and more. https://cellbased.link/keq
Digging Deeper: Shortly after this Series E financing, Ginkgo announced a collaboration with Berkeley Lights, a technology company which develops and commercializes workflows and processes to find the best cells.
While both companies are in the space of developing technology to enable more efficient engineering of biology, we are seeing Ginkgo leverage their enormous capital injection to partner with other players in the space and incorporate the leading technologies into their own foundries. → foundries according to Ginkgo are highly automated facilities modeled on semiconductor fabs. https://cellbased.link/7em
Ginkgo will incorporate Berkeley Lights’ optofluidic platform into its workflow, which is expected to dramatically increase the speed of screening cells and improve output efficiency. The collaboration is said to triple Ginkgo’s capacity to measure the performance of cells. https://cellbased.link/ose
According to the press release:
- Ginkgo will start by incorporating the optofluidic platform for engineering mammalian cells for drug discovery.
- The platform will then be leveraged for engineering organisms such as yeast and bacterial+fungal cells for development of a broad range of synthetic biology products.
