NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Organism design company Ginkgo Bioworks announced today that it has raised $100 million in a Series C funding round.
The firm said it plans to use the funds to grow into new markets such as commodity chemicals, industrial enzymes, and human health markets. It also plans to build a next-generation automated foundry called Bioworks2 where Ginkgo's organism engineers can develop new designs at a larger scale.
Y Combinator's Continuity Fund, Senator Investment Group, Baillie Gifford, Viking Global Investors, and Allen & Company participated in the funding round, bringing Ginkgo's total private funding to $154 million in the past 15 months.
"We believe that designed biology will be for this century what information technology and computers were to the last," said Cofounder and CEO Jason Kelly in a statement. "Biology is the most advanced manufacturing technology on the planet. As we get better at designing biology, we'll use it to make everything, disrupting sectors that the traditional tech industry hasn't been able to access. In the past few years, we've heard that biology is becoming a software problem, but biology can do many things that software simply can't."
Ginkgo also said that it has signed deals with Twist Bioscience and Gen9, each of which will manufacture 300 million base pairs of DNA to be used as raw material for Ginkgo's biological prototypes, and to generate genetic designs that will be built and tested at the Bioworks2 foundry.