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U.K. biotech company Bactobio Ltd. has closed an oversubscribed £6 million ($7.4 million) bridge financing round.
The financing was led by Bridford Group, with support from angel investors Peder Holk Nielsen (former CEO and president of Novozymes) and Hugh Grant (former chairman and CEO of Monsanto). New investors included the founders of the London-based fintech unicorn Lendable and Entangle Group.
The company said its combination of synthetic biology, next-generation sequencing and machine learning gives exclusive access to a growing library of thousands of previously unscreened microbes.
An interdisciplinary approach then enables a thorough exploration of the potential chemical space, creating the opportunity for new discovery across markets in healthcare, agriculture and bio-derived chemicals.
The funds will be used to advance Bactobio’s discovery pipeline and enable characterization of the next generation of antimicrobial solutions.
Toward commercial products
“With our 2021 fundraise we built a complete end-to-end compound discovery pipeline. Today’s raise supports our continued drive towards automation and data-driven science that will help turn our captured biodiversity into commercial products,” said Daniel Hansen, CEO and founder of Bactobio.
“We are immensely proud to receive such a high level of new and continued support from high caliber investors.”
Mark Wilkinson, CSO at Bactobio, added: “It is estimated that fewer than 3% of the potential natural products encoded in nature have been identified to-date. Bactobio’s bioactivity-driven but target-agnostic approach lets nature do the work and lead us towards compounds which have been unimaginable and previously inaccessible to drug discovery efforts. Funds from this round will allow us to dig deeper into this previously untapped bioresource.”