Twist Bioscience Raises $61M

Twist Bioscience, a company accelerating science and innovation through rapid, high-quality DNA synthesis, has announced the completion of a $61 million Series D private financing. Crossover participants in the round include ARCH Overage Fund, Merieux Developpement, Cormorant Asset Management LLC, Fidelity Management and Research Company and Foresite Capital Management LLC. Additional investors include ARCH Venture Partners, WuXi Healthcare Ventures, Illumina, Inc., Nick and Joby Pritzker (through their family’s firm Tao Invest), Paladin Capital Group, Yuri Milner, Boris Nikolic and additional strategic corporate and venture investors. Since the company’s founding in 2013, Twist Bioscience has raised a total of $133 million, as well as $20 million in debt.

“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 global level,” said 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.”

In addition, Twist Bioscience secured a debt facility of up to a $15 million loan with an added $5 million revolving account receivable line of credit through Silicon Valley Bank. Under the terms of the agreement, Twist will be able to draw upon a portion of the loan immediately with the remainder available upon completion of certain business milestones.

“To date, we have shipped 65 million base pairs of DNA to more than 100 customers through our high-fidelity, high-throughput gene fabrication. We will continue to leverage the power of scale afforded by our proprietary silicon-based DNA synthesis platform, targeting a beta launch in early 2016,” said Emily Leproust, Ph.D., CEO of Twist Bioscience. “Importantly, with this financing we intend to build on our strong foundation of delivering high quality, high throughput DNA faster and cheaper, taking the next step to vertically integrate into advance research and development in multiple market segments with existing relationships in industrial chemicals and data storage, and additional partnerships expected in the pharmaceutical industry and other markets that incrementally extend the reach of our innovative production methods.”