Culture Biosciences, a company that helps biotech firms develop and scale manufacturing processes in the cloud, announced a Series B financing of $80 million led by Northpond Ventures.

The outsourcing model of Culture Biosciences fills a clear gap in the biotech industry. Synthetic biology is at the core of cellular agriculture, but it can also be used to produce vaccines and replace petrochemicals as a source of many materials that are essential to the everyday lives of billions of people, such as rubber, acrylic, and surfactants. 

But as the next wave of synthetic biology products is coming, infrastructure is lacking: "Recently there’s been an explosion in the number of new companies in synthetic biology and biopharmaceuticals, and large multinational corporations are also increasingly participating in this space," said Will Patrick, CEO and co-founder of Culture Biosciences. “In spite of that, there's a huge gap in the infrastructure required to produce these bioproducts at commercial scale.”

“Demand for sustainable bio-based products is rapidly increasing, but innovators face two key challenges,” explained Andrew Lee, Ph.D., Senior Associate at Northpond Ventures. “Culture’s cloud bioreactor lab already addresses the first challenge: bench-scale process optimization. Companies still need to scale to commercial quantities, however. By expanding its technology and data infrastructure, Culture can address this growing market need."

Since its inception in 2016, Culture Biosciences has worked with 30+ of the world’s leading biotech companies to accelerate their bioprocess development, while more than doubling its full-time employee count and investing in new facilities. After an initial focus on fermentation, the company’s capabilities expanded to mammalian cell culture and analytical chemistry.

One of its recent milestones has been the launch of Culture’s Cloud Console, a one-stop web app that clients can use to streamline experiment data analysis and foster cross-team collaboration.

“This funding will help create a new and improved customer journey within biomanufacturing,” explained Patrick. “Biotech companies will be able to use our cloud platform from bench to pilot scale, which is a big leap toward our goal of making biomanufacturing R&D a fully digital experience.”

Culture’s cloud lab is ideal not only for synthetic biology startups. Established players in the biopharmaceutical industry too can use it to accelerate product development through testing many different factors in parallel and optimizing their process much more quickly. 

To learn more about Culture Biosciences, visit their website culturebiosciences.com or get in touch clicking on the button below.