The Bay area-based organism engineering firm Zymergen announced that it has brought in an unheard-of $130 million in their latest Series B fundraising round led by SoftBank Group. In addition, Zymergen announced that two new members will be joining its Board of Directors: Deep Nishar, International Managing Director at SoftBank Group, and Dr. Steven Chu, Nobel laureate and former U.S. Secretary of Energy.Zymergen founder and CEO Joshua Hoffman welcomed the new partnership with SoftBank with excitement. “We’re thrilled that SoftBank understands our proven business and supports our long-term growth,” he said. “The intersection of machine learning and biology allows us to reliably engineer microbes, resulting in new products, new jobs, and wholly new markets.”New Zymergen board member Deep Nishar of SoftBank Group echoed Hoffman’s sentiments and reiterated his firm’s belief in the future promise of Zymergen. “We are investing in Zymergen because they are a pre-eminent bioengineering company and the market leader. They have a revolutionary approach to engineering biology that is already solving business problems for Fortune 500 customers, and a proven ability to impact the economics of these mature, at-scale businesses.”This most recent round brings the startup sensation to a grand total of $174 million amassed in funding. At Zymergen’s inception just three years ago the company raised a $2 million seed round. In June of 2015, they followed this up with a gigantic $42-million Series A fundraiser led by venture capital fund Data Collective, who returned to join in on this latest round. Data Collective Managing Partner Matt Ocko also contributed his ongoing vote of confidence in Zymergen’s potential. “DCVC has doubled down on Zymergen twice since our seed investment because the company transforms pivotal biology problems into solvable engineering problems, with repeatable, high precision outcomes—more like semiconductor manufacturing than traditional biology,” Ocko said. “Zymergen’s superb team has solved some of the hardest problems in machine learning and applied robotics, uniting them in a platform and giving the company years of sustainable advantage.”As a returning investor, Data Collective was joined by True Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, DFJ, Innovation Endeavors, Obvious Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures. In addition, several new firms joined the ranks of these Zymergen veteran investors, including Iconiq Capital, Prelude Ventures, and Tao Capital Partners.What’s in Zymergen’s secret sauce?Zymergen’s automated platform constitutes a big data and machine learning approach to microbial engineering. The company uses its rapid prototyping capabilities on a massive scale to produce custom microbes for a wide range partners in the business of industrial fermentation, from flavors and fragrances to agricultural and pharmaceutical chemical producers. By automating the wet lab components of microbe design and integrating these steps with computational analysis and machine learning, Zymergen is able to reduce variability due to human error and test thousands of strains in parallel to arrive at the most optimized possibility.New Zymergen board member Dr. Steven Chu provided his own explanation as to why Zymergen’s approach is such a powerful force in synthetic biology. “Biology is inherently complex, and in the past, this complexity was used to explain inconsistent results. Zymergen approaches biology with an engineering and mathematical mindset. This enables them to put all the pieces together in a repeatable and trustworthy way,” he said. “Zymergen has created a complete solution. As a result, they have achieved a level of scale and quality control previously unseen in industrial biology.”In addition to partnering with customers in the industrial chemical sector, Zymergen is pursuing the production of their own bio-based chemical products. Earlier this year, Zymergen announced an agreement to collaborate with computational design startup Arzeda on the latter of these two goals, leveraging Arzeda’s enzyme modeling technology for the fermentation of novel chemicals.Rapid prototyping of microbes is gaining speedZymergen has been described as “the Google of strain optimization,” but they are hardly alone in their approach to microbial engineering. Both automation and big data are becoming popular motifs within the synthetic biology community at large. Synthace, Synbiota, and Transcriptic are just a few of the startups that are harnessing automation and computer integration for microbial engineering. Ginkgo Bioworks, perhaps Zymergen’s chief competitor, is pursuing rapid prototyping for much the same goals as Zymergen, and recently inked deals to purchase historically large quantities of DNA to plug into its microbial prototypes. Everything is certainly trending toward higher-throughput strategies for the more rapid realization of valuable products by the synthetic biology industry.Zymergen has announced that it intends to use its Series B funding to move forward with the products in its pipeline, continue with its growth plan, and bring aboard talented team members from software engineering, automation, and biology backgrounds.