- GeneMill at the University of Liverpool receives first benchtop Onyx platform in Europe
- Financing round led by Fidelity and T. Rowe Price funds underscores vast opportunities to bring Inscripta’s CRISPR-based technology to the broader bioeconomy
Inscripta, Inc., the digital genome engineering company, today announced the first commercial shipment of its Onyx™ platform and the closing of a $150 million Series E financing round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.
Among the first organizations to receive the Onyx platform is GeneMill, a state-of-the-art synthetic biology foundry at the University of Liverpool. “Inscripta’s Onyx is an extraordinarily powerful platform that will enable high-throughput genome editing and analysis. It will revolutionize our abilities in synthetic biology,” said Professor Douglas Kell, Principal Investigator of the project funded under the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council’s ALERT 19 competition.
Dr. James Johnson, lead co-applicant and head of the Liverpool GeneMill, added, “We look forward to continuing our close collaboration with the Inscripta team, working together to explore a wide range of genome discovery and forward-engineering research projects with our customers and collaborators from around the world.”
In a 2020 report, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that 60% of physical inputs used in manufacturing today could one day be produced through biological means. Plastics, fuels, medicines, and more could be made via sustainable, planet-friendly biological pipelines such as yeast fermentation. Already, yeast is being used to produce sweeteners, industrial chemicals, and medicinal components.
“This is an exciting milestone for Inscripta, and it follows our mission to enable researchers to realize the full potential of the bioeconomy. GeneMill, and our other early customers, will be instrumental partners in shaping the broad impact of the Onyx platform’s unprecedented scale, performance and accessibility,” said Sri Kosaraju, President and CEO of Inscripta. “In addition to our excitement about the Onyx platform, we see further future potential with our innovation, which is captured by our IP portfolio of nearly 100 issued U.S. patents. To this end, we are fortunate to have the support of some of the world’s most notable investors who share our enthusiasm for the long-term opportunity to build transformative technology and an impactful organization.”
In addition to Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC and funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., the Series E funding includes participation from new investors D1 Capital Partners and Durable Capital Partners LP, as well as existing investors Foresite Capital, Counterpoint Global (Morgan Stanley), and JS Capital LLC.
