NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Synthetic DNA firm Twist Bioscience announced today the completion of a $37 million Series C financing round.
The round was led by Illumina. New investors Fidelity Management and Research and Foresite Capital Mangement also participated in the round, as did all existing investors including Nick and Joby Pritzker through their family's firm Tao Invest; Arch Invest Venture Partners; Paladin Capital Group; Yuri Milner; and other corporate and venture investors.
In conjunction with the financing round, Nicholas Naclerio, Illumina's senior VP of corporate development and general manager of enterprise informatics, will join Twist's board of directors.
Twist Bio CEO Emily Leproust said in a statement that the firm is focused on "validating the fit between our proprietary product offering and the wide variety of customer needs for synthetic DNA," and will use the funding to accelerate into a beta commercial launch in the fall while also pursuing opportunities to add product capabilities and services.
A year ago, the San Francisco-based firm announced it raised $26 million in a Series B financing round to commercialize its semiconductor-based synthetic gene manufacturing process. It also received a $5.1 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop the company's large-scale, high-throughput construction of genetic designs.
Twist said that it has raised a total of $82.1 million since its founding in 2013.