NEW YORK – Chinese sequencing technology company Axbio said on Monday that it has secured $100 million in Series B financing.
The round was led by the AstraZeneca-CICC investment fund, a joint healthcare fund run by AstraZeneca and Chinese private equity firm CICC Capital, and Yunfeng Capital, a Chinese venture capital firm backed by Alibaba Cofounder Jack Ma. Other investors in the round included Singaporean investment firm CBC Group, Chinese state-owned investment holding company State Development & Investment Corp. (SDIC), and Chinese private equity and venture capital firm 5Y Capital.
The Shenzhen-based sequencing startup said it will use the funds to support the development and commercialization of its nanopore-based sequencer, as well as to build a manufacturing facility.
Axbio’s new sequencing platform, which uses nanopores and circular consensus sequencing (CCS), is “low-cost, small, highly accurate, and can generate long read lengths,” Hui Tian, the company’s cofounder, said in a statement. In addition, it can sequence a single base repeatedly at the single-molecule level, he added. According to Tian, Axbio’s first GMP production facility will come online by the end of 2022. The company said on its website that the facility is located in Wuxi in Jiangsu province.
Founded in 2016 in Silicon Valley, Axbio said it has R&D centers both in the US and China. The company said on WeChat that it raised “tens of millions of dollars” in Series A financing in October 2021, led by Chinese venture capital firms 5Y Capital, Kaitai Capital, MSA, and Yuanxiao Huachuang Investment Management.