Twist Bioscience, a company focused on synthetic DNA, today announced the completion of a $37 million Series C financing. Led by Illumina, Inc., participants in the round include new investors Fidelity Management and Research Company and Foresite Capital Management LLC, as well as all existing investors including Nick and Joby Pritzker (through their family’s firm Tao Invest), ARCH Venture Partners, Paladin Capital Group, Yuri Milner, and additional strategic corporate and venture investors. Since the company’s founding in 2013, Twist Bioscience has raised a total of $82.1 million.
“Working with a select group of customers following our alpha manufacturing launch in April, we are now focused on validating the fit between our proprietary product offering and the wide variety of customer needs for synthetic DNA,” said Emily Leproust, Ph.D., chief executive officer of Twist Bioscience. “This funding will allow us to accelerate into a beta commercial launch this fall. In addition, we intend to pursue strategic opportunities to add product capabilities and services to further enhance the Twist Bioscience user experience.”
In conjunction with the financing Nicholas J. Naclerio, Ph.D., Illumina’s senior vice president of corporate development and general manager of enterprise informatics will join the Twist Bioscience board of directors. Naclerio joins Rob Chess, chairman of the board of Nektar Therapeutics; Paul Conley, Ph.D., managing director of Paladin Capital Group; Keith Crandell, co-founder and managing director of ARCH Venture Partners; Fred Craves, Ph.D., founder and managing director of Bay City Capital; Bill Banyai, Ph.D., chief operating officer at Twist Bioscience; and Emily Leproust, Ph.D., chief executive officer of Twist Bioscience, on the board of directors.
“Twist Bioscience has developed a unique method of mass producing high quality DNA fragments and synthetic genes at very low cost utilizing silicon wafer manufacturing techniques,” said Naclerio. “The ability to ‘write’ genes as easily as our sequencers can ‘read’ genes will further accelerate the pace of life science research and could enable entirely new applications.”