Twist Bioscience, the San Francisco based DNA synthesis startup, announced the completion of a $61 million Series D to drive market penetration. This funding round comes as yet further validation of Twist’s acceleration of research and development through synthetic DNA, following hot on the heels of the announcement in November 2015 that is was to supply 100 million based pairs of synthetic DNA to fellow Boston synbio startup – Ginkgo Bioworks.“Twist Bioscience moved from founding to commercialization in just two years and is now ready to deliver impactful changes in the way synthetic DNA is sourced at a global level”, stated Francois Valencony, General Manager of Merieux Developpement. “We are thrilled to support the expansion of commercial operations of the company in the US and internationally, as well as the development of novel vertical applications made possible by the Twist Bioscience technology.”

Reaching $143 Million

This series D follows on from a $37 million series C in June 2015, taking the company’s funding total raised to date to $143 million, as well as $20 million in debt. The round is one of a number of impressive raises in the synthetic biology space announced in the past 6 months, including a $32 million Series B by Bolt Threads, a $44 million series A by Zymergen, a $45 million Series B by Ginkgo Bioworks, and most recently in September 2015 a $70 million Series B by Intellia Therapeutics.

Delivering High-quality, High-throughput DNA Faster and Cheaper

Twist Bioscience have through their high-fidelity, high-throughput gene fabrication shipped 65 million base pairs of DNA to more than 100 customers to date. Emily Leproust, Twist Bioscience’s CEO and one of Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Global Thinkers of 2015 anticipates a beta launch of their silicon-based DNA synthesis platform in early 2016.

Twist Bioscience’s 10,000-well silicon plate mounted on a green plastic carrier. Each well has a 600 µm diameter dimension."On the technology side, our focus is to increase capacity and reduce turnaround time,” stated Emily. “For the business expansion, the focus will be to penetrate all four segments of the market: pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, academia and agbio as well as to enable the development of additional verticals around DNA data storage and antibody drug development.”The ability for Twist Bioscience to penetrate these market segments, as well as develop new verticals, lies in their proprietary semiconductor-based synthetic DNA manufacturing process. The process features a 10,000-well silicon platform capable of producing synthetic biology tools, including genes, oligonucleotide pools, and variant libraries. Synthesis of DNA on silicon instead of on traditional 96-well plastic plates allows the platform to overcome the current inefficiencies of synthetic DNA production, and enables cost-effective, rapid, high-quality and high throughput synthetic gene production.Readers who are interested in hearing more about Twist Bioscience are encouraged to come along to SynBioBeta London 2016, where we will be hearing more about their work.