This article has been updated to correct that the Series B financing round has not closed yet.
NEW YORK – Synthetic biology company Molecular Assemblies said on Tuesday that it has raised $25.8 million in Series B financing.
New investor Casdin Capital was joined by all major Series A investors — Agilent Technologies, iSelect Fund, Codexis, LYFE Capital, and Argonautic Ventures — in the financing.
San Diego-based Molecular Assemblies said it will devote the funds to advancing its proprietary enzymatic DNA synthesis technology toward early commercialization and to start a customer program later this year.
"It's great to see the continued support and excitement of our investors as we advance our powerful, differentiated, and proprietary Fully Enzymatic Synthesis technology to commercial access and enable the cost-effective production of ever-lengthening strands of DNA," Molecular Assemblies President and CEO Michael Kamdar said in a statement.
According to Kamdar, the company is planning to release a "key customer program" later this year for its FES technology. Relying on terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase (TdT), FES can purportedly synthesize much longer DNA sequences with fewer errors in an aqueous solution than other methods and has potential applications in CRISPR, next-generation sequencing, and gene assembly, the company said.
In 2020, the firm partnered with Codexis to engineer an improved TdT enzyme, and last year, Codexis and Casdin Capital invested $10 million in Molecular Assemblies as part of the Series B round.