Vital funding established for Evonetix projects

Financing will allow company’s development of DNA synthesis chip technology to commercial scale

Evonetix – a company which focuses on semiconductor technology and DNA synthesis – has revealed the completion of a pivotal $24m financing round.

This will extend its total series B funding to over $54m – translating to £44m. The drive was led by investor Foresite Capital in addition to Morningside, DCVC, Molten Ventures, Cambridge Consultants, Civilization Ventures and Providence.

The milestone investment will provide impetus for the continued development of Evonetix’s semiconductor chips to commercial scale. Meanwhile, it will also leverage the extension of gene assembly capabilities for its binary assembly technology to deliver gene-length DNA in a bench top instrument.

Evonetix believes the platform holds the potential to revolutionise the way DNA is prepared and delivered to users in the rapidly growing field of synthetic biology, accelerating research in applications across the pharma industry, but also biotech, food, agriculture and even data storage.

The company’s proprietary synthesis process incorporates a novel silicon chip, to control the synthesis of DNA at many thousands of independent thermally controlled reaction sites. This results in a long DNA on the chip surface. Such an approach enables the accurate synthesis of thousands of sequences on a single chip, thereby meeting the demand for complex libraries of long DNA in days rather than weeks.

Paul Beastall, chair of the board of directors at Evonetix, was optimistic about what the financing could achieve: “We’re delighted to have secured additional funding from our existing investors in this oversubscribed round, testament not only to the promise of our novel approach to gene synthesis, but also the unrivalled expertise of our interdisciplinary team.”

Colin McCracken, chief executive officer at Evonetix, reflected: “This substantial investment round demonstrates continued confidence in the progress of our technical development and its potential to revolutionise the accessibility of gene synthesis.”

He added: “Evonetix is in a very exciting phase, having recently opened our early access programme. This investment will support us as we execute on our commercial strategy to put bench top gene synthesis in the hands of users.”