SoftBank has led the largest investment round to date for an upstream business in the food and agtech space, spearheading a $400 million Series C for synthetic microbial manufacturing tech startup Zymergen. Also participating in the round were Goldman Sachs, Hanwha Asset Management, Data Collective, True Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, SFJ, and Innovation Endeavors.
Founded five years ago and operating out of a 301,000 square-foot facility in Emeryville, California, Zymergen engineers microbial strains for use within the food, agriculture, pharmaceutical, specialty chemical, and electronics industries. Much of the company’s work is in the agri-chemical arena, creating biological crop inputs which it markets to large-scale companies.
By leveraging advances in artificial intelligence, robotic lab automation, and cutting-edge genomics, Zymergen is unleashing biology’s potential to accelerate industrial progress to meet demand, and to disassociate industry from exhausted and harmful petroleum-based chemical building blocks. Through its proprietary technology platform, Zymergen analyzes genomes for trait improvements that are undetectable by humans, thereby rapidly and reliably providing its customers with new previously-unknown materials, material diversity, and performance capabilities by cost-effectively engineering biology.
“We believe biology will allow us to reinvent all kinds of material products we use in our everyday lives,” said Joshua Hoffman, Zymergen co-founder and CEO. “Zymergen enables its globally leading customers to deliver new and existing products faster, more profitably, at higher quality, with a dramatically reduced environmental footprint, all on a repeatable basis.”
Joshua Hoffman, co-founder and CEO of Zymergen, told Tech Crunch that because the company uses robotics to eliminate human error, and machine learning to detect advanced patterns, the resulting data sets are unique to a level where rivalry is unlikely.
“Roughly 70 percent of the things that we find are in parts of the genome that humans don’t understand,” Hoffman told Tech Crunch.
However, Boston-based Ginkgo Bioworks is working along very similar lines, developing custom microbes using robots at a fraction of the cost of the same process being conducted by human scientists, for everything from organic pesticides, to sweeteners, to fragrances.
In June 2016 Ginkgo Bioworks raised a $100 million Series C backed by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, Senator Investment Group, Cascade Investment, Baillie Gifford, Viking Global Investors, and Allen & Company LLC, bringing its total funding to $430 million to date, compared to Zymergen’s total funding to date of $535 million.
“The secular trend of synthetic biology, enabled by the genomics revolution and computational biology, is creating new opportunities across multiple industrial sectors,” said Deep Nishar, senior managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.
Zymergen uses AI algorithms and robotic genomic “factories” to run tens of thousands of experiments on genomes to identify subtle signs of improvement and new paths that would enable Zymergen’s team to optimize molecules for specific traits – often in under a year, compared to using traditional methods which would take decades and cost billions of dollars.
“By marrying innovations in technology and science, Zymergen treats biology like a search space, much like Google treated indexing the web,” said the executive vice president at Hanwha Asset Management who drove the company’s investment in Zymergen. “And furthermore, they are doing this at scale, discovering new applications for biology ready to deploy to their industrial partners. From improving time to market, to performance and productivity, the impact Zymergen has on its partners’ bottom line presents unmatched potential for invigorating industrial manufacturing.”
-Lynda Kiernan