Synthetic Biology Firm Weiyuan Nets Nearly CNY 100 Mn in Angel Round

Healthcare Author: Siren Chen May 30, 2022 09:08 PM (GMT+8)

Founded in December 2021, Weiyuan Synthetic Biotech is committed to producing various compounds in a low-carbon, energy-saving, and sustainable manner. 

biotechnology

Weiyuan Synthetic Biotechnology (Chinese: 微元合成生物技术) completed an angel round financing of nearly CNY 100 million, led by Matrix Partner China (Chinese: 经纬创投), followed by BioTrack Capital (Chinese: 博远资本), Henan Investment Group Huirong Fund (Chinese: 河南投资集团汇融基金), K2VC (Chinese: 险峰长青) and Hoshi Capital (Chinese: 红什资本).

This round of financing is mainly used to build R&D laboratories, improve underlying technologies, and develop product pipelines such as APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients), high value-added applications of natural products, and platform compounds.

The company has the underlying technology for multi-carbon source utilization, using affordable and cheap carbon sources instead of glucose to solve the problems of food crisis faced by traditional biological manufacturing. In terms of bulk material, several low-cost biomanufacturing product pipelines have been designed to alleviate the cost pressure of scale-up and commercialization.

Investment in synthetic biology is picking up steam. As material producers, synthetic biology companies shall always be aware of the advantages they possess to obtain development opportunities in the fierce market competition in the traditional biological manufacturing industry. Tao Yong, director of the Microbial Physiology and Biochemistry Laboratory of the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, pointed out.

Weiyuan Synthetic Biotechnology's competitors include Bota Biotech (Chinese: 恩和生物), Bluepha (Chinese: 蓝晶微生物), Synceres (Chinese: 森瑞斯生物) and Abiochem (Chinese: 弈柯莱生物).