NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Private DNA synthesis firm Twist Bioscience said today that it has closed a $61 million Series D round of financing with a group of existing and new investors.
Investors included Arch Overage Fund, Merieux Developpement, Cormorant Asset Management, Fidelity Management and Research Company, and Foresite Capital Management. Other investors included Arch Venture Partners, WuXi Healthcare Ventures, Illumina, Nick and Joby Pritzker, Paladin Capital Group, Yuri Milner, and Boris Nikolic.
The latest financing round comes about six months after Twist completed a $37 million Series C round. Since its inception in 2013, the company has raised a total of $133 million.
Twist also said that it has secured a debt facility of up to $15 million with an additional $5 million revolving account receivable line of credit through Silicon Valley Bank. The company is able to draw upon an undisclosed portion of the loan immediately, with additional money available upon the 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," Twist CEO Emily Leproust said in a statement. "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."
Leproust added that using the financing, Twist intends "to build on our strong foundation of delivering high-quality, high-throughput DNA faster and cheaper, taking the next step to vertically integrate into advanced 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."