Last week, Ginkgo raised $290 million in Series E financing. This week the synthetic biology company announced another raise of $350 million for what they are calling the Ferment Consortium (General Atlantic, Viking Global Investors, and Bill Gates’ investment firm Cascade Investment participated in the financing). https://cellbased.link/321ea
According to company press release, the Ferment Consortium is a $350 million private investment vehicle for funding spin out companies.
We have already seen two examples of these spin out companies:
- Joyn Bio: joint partnership with Bayer Crop Sciences with $100 million in financing
- Motif FoodWorks: ingredient company with $117.5 million in financing and strategic support from Fonterra and Louis Dreyfus Company.
The Ferment Consortium echos Ginkgo CEO, Jason Kelly’s, sentiments expressed earlier this year in a Forbes article, as he compared Ginkgo’s business model to that of Berkshire Hathaway: “It’s a Berkshire for biotech.” http://cellbased.link/czo
