March 6, 2020

By Lynda Kiernan

You will see in this week’s stories that a company called C16 Biosciences that is using bioreactor, or biomanufacturing, to produce a sustainable alternative to palm oil has raised a $20 million Series A. To help accomplish production at scale, C16 is a client of Culture Biosciences – a company that has just raised $15 through a Series A led by Cultivian Sandbox. 

Also participating in this round were  The Production Board, and existing investors Verily Life Sciences, Section 32, YCombinator, and E14 Fund. 

“Culture is poised to offer the industry new design and analytics tools to improve processes beyond what is possible today,” said David Friedberg, The Production Board. “By leveraging the massive amounts of structured data that they generate for customers, they are positioned to bring AI and machine learning into biomanufacturing in an impactful way.”

The process of biomanufacturing to act upon a biological feedstock (often yeast) to create new molecules has rapidly become the technological foundation for a range of food tech and agtech startups we’ve recently discussed. Among many, these include:

Biotech startup Clara Foods is working to create egg whites from genetically modified yeast instead of chickens.

Hyasynth Biologicals Inc., a Montreal-based biological company focused on cannabinoids and biosynthesis raised $10 million in September 2018 to support its platform that makes it possible to produce phytocannabinoids and phytocannabinoid analogues from genetically modified strains of yeast.

Mentioned earlier, C16 Biosciences has developed a proprietary technology platform that uses bioreactors to transform a proprietary yeast into a sustainable alternative to palm oil that offers the ability to better control the oil’s properties, along with a more efficient supply chain and full traceability.

And New Age Meats recently raised $2.7 million in Seed funding to employ automation and data science rooted in stem cell research, together with bioreactor optimization to develop technology to make meat from animal cells, without the need for slaughter. 

“We’re so excited to be working with our diverse group of investors who have expertise in the various industries that are doing biomanufacturing,” said Will Patrick, CEO, Culture Biosciences. “The next generation of breakthrough products across industries will be biomanufactured: our customers use biology to produce everything from novel therapeutics to food proteins to renewable chemicals and materials. These companies have all historically struggled with slow and inflexible legacy approaches to scaling up their lab discoveries to commercial production. Our goal is to enable them to develop and scale their bioprocesses in less time, helping to bring their transformational bioproducts to market sooner.”

 The use of bioreactors, or the process of biomanufacturing, needs multiple, specific factors such as feedstock, PH, temperature, and oxygen levels to be exactly determined to end with the desired result – which can be a costly endeavor and a challenge when considering building out in-house, especially for early-stage enterprises. 

Culture Biosciences is shifting the risk for these startups by presenting bioreacting as-a-service through its cloud bioreacting platform. With a bank of 100 bioreactors, Culture Biosciences can help clients design their first bioprocess, or help execute a process that has already been established.

The company’s cloud bioreactors offer full control of experimental design and provide real-time monitoring and live process changes. Overall, this generates more data, more quickly, and gives advanced data visualization and analytics to generate new insights for improved bioprocesses.

“We have learned that the key challenge to commercializing new bio-based products is developing and scaling manufacturing processes in a cost efficient and timely manner,” says Dan Phillips of Cultivian Sandbox. “We’ve watched many companies try to solve the same scaling challenges by investing in expensive R&D and production facilities and/or struggling to scale processes through contract manufacturers. We think Culture is perfectly positioned to develop new technologies that solve these challenges, enabling the entire industry to flourish.”

Since announcing $5.5 million in Seed funding, Culture Biosciences has grown rapidly, increasing capacity five-fold, growing its client base to more than 30 customers, launching live data monitoring and visualization capabilities, and expanding from fermentation to mammalian cell culture.

Now, with this new funding, the company plans to triple its bioreactor capacity and develop additional software tools to further digitize biomanufacturing R&D.

“To date, we have provided biotech customers an on-demand way of running bioreactors, and given them the ability to monitor their experiments and visualize their data in the cloud,” said Will Patrick. “This funding will support our goal of making biomanufacturing R&D a digital experience by enabling scientists to manage their entire R&D workflow in our software application.”

– Lynda Kiernan is Editor with GAI Media and daily contributor to the GAI News and Agtech Intel platforms. If you would like to submit a contribution for consideration, please contact Ms. Kiernan at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.