-- Oversubscribed Round Validates Twist Bioscience's Acceleration of Research and Development through Synthetic DNA --
-- Proceeds to Support Vertical Integration in Multiple Market Segments --
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 19, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Twist Bioscience, a company accelerating science and innovation through rapid, high-quality DNA synthesis, today announced the completion of a $61 million Series D private financing. Crossover participants in the round include ARCH Overage Fund, Merieux Developpement, Cormorant Asset Management LLC, Fidelity Management and Research Company and Foresite Capital Management LLC. Additional investors include ARCH Venture Partners, WuXi Healthcare Ventures, Illumina, Inc., Nick and Joby Pritzker (through their family's firm Tao Invest), Paladin Capital Group, Yuri Milner, Boris Nikolic and additional strategic corporate and venture investors. Since the company's founding in 2013, Twist Bioscience has raised a total of $133 million, as well as $20 million in debt.
"Twist Bioscience moved from founding to commercialization in just two years and is now ready to deliver impactful changes in the way synthetic DNA is sourced at global level," said Francois Valencony, general manager of Merieux Developpement. "We are thrilled to support the expansion of commercial operations of the company in the US and internationally, as well as the development of novel vertical applications made possible by the Twist Bioscience technology."
In addition, Twist Bioscience secured a debt facility of up to a $15 million loan with an added $5 million revolving account receivable line of credit through Silicon Valley Bank. Under the terms of the agreement, Twist will be able to draw upon a portion of the loan immediately with the remainder available upon completion of certain business milestones.
"To date, we have shipped 65 million base pairs of DNA to more than 100 customers through our high-fidelity, high-throughput gene fabrication. We will continue to leverage the power of scale afforded by our proprietary silicon-based DNA synthesis platform, targeting a beta launch in early 2016," said Emily Leproust, Ph.D., CEO of Twist Bioscience. "Importantly, with this financing we intend to build on our strong foundation of delivering high quality, high throughput DNA faster and cheaper, taking the next step to vertically integrate into advance research and development in multiple market segments with existing relationships in industrial chemicals and data storage, and additional partnerships expected in the pharmaceutical industry and other markets that incrementally extend the reach of our innovative production methods."
About Twist Bioscience
At Twist Bioscience, our expertise is accelerating science and innovation by leveraging the power of scale. We have developed a proprietary semiconductor-based synthetic DNA manufacturing process featuring a 10,000-well silicon platform capable of producing synthetic biology tools, including genes, oligonucleotide pools and variant libraries. By synthesizing DNA on silicon instead of on traditional 96-well plastic plates, our platform overcomes the current inefficiencies of synthetic DNA production, and enables cost-effective, rapid, high-quality and high throughput synthetic gene production, which in turn, expedites the design, build, test cycle to enable personalized medicines, pharmaceuticals, sustainable chemical production, improved agriculture production, diagnostics, biodetection and data storage. For more information, please visit www.twistbioscience.com. Twist Bioscience is on Twitter. Sign up to follow our Twitter feed @TwistBioscience at https://twitter.com/TwistBioscience.
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SOURCE Twist Bioscience
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