The round was led by the OS Fund, including Bioeconomy Capital and Sustainable Conversion Ventures, as well as a follow-up investment by Arzeda’s seed investor, WRF Capital. Arzeda’s board will be extended to include Jeff Klunzinger, co-founder of the OS Fund.
The new investment will accelerate the scale-up of Arzeda’s advanced protein design technology, which can provide revolutionary new production pathways for a wide range of valuable chemicals and materials, and serve more partners on a larger scale. Arzeda has already successfully developed proteins for global producers, including DuPont, Mitsubishi Rayon, INVISTA and others, that improve crop yield and resilience, increase the performance and sustainability of nylons and reduce the cost of producing high-value food ingredients.
The funding will be used to upgrade Arzeda’s high-performance computing and laboratory screening capabilities, enabling the company to meet the growing demand of its industrial partners. The company will also hire additional staff to expand its business development, protein design and development teams, as well as fermentation and downstream process engineers. Arzeda also plans to fully integrate its computational and data science teams with laboratory operations, streamline the process used by the company to design proteins and enzymes and confirm their functionality in commercial production settings.
“Our intentional strategy of initially financing a company with customer revenue has allowed us to prove that our computer-assisted protein design technology and synthetic biology approaches can create and improve the industrial fermentation path for virtually any chemical,” said Alex Zanghellini, co-founder and CEO of Arzeda. “With this Series A funding, we will be able to expand the throughput capability of our protein design platform and deploy a robust product development pipeline. From concept to industrial production, Arzeda’s existing and new partners will be able to leverage protein design to make better, more sustainable chemicals, food and feed ingredients, materials, and even new molecules that are not found in nature. “That’s right.
Proteins are working horses and life-saving engines, accounting for up to 98% of all biological activity. The ability to rewrite life software allows Arzeda to engineer organisms to create building blocks for industrial applications.
Arzeda’s proprietary synthetic biology platform leverages new advances in protein design and computing to develop the complex genetic instructions needed to build highly customized proteins and enzymes. These instructions are then inserted into the DNA of yeast or similar microorganisms, transforming them into “cell factories” that use the fermentation process to produce a wide range of industrial molecules. Capitalizing on ever-expanding cloud computing power, the platform can choose successful protein sequence combinations from trillions of options, which are then validated and optimized in Arzeda’s laboratory.
“Many of the things we use every day will be made more efficient, less toxic and more efficient with Arzeda’s approach to protein design,” said Jeff Klunzinger, co-founder of the OS Fund. “We were also impressed by the company’s commitment to building a process that can seamlessly move a new design from an engineer’s imagination to a manufacturer’s production line. Perhaps the most exciting prospect is the use of technology to design molecules that have never been seen before. This will redefine what is possible for a wide range of industries. “That’s right.
For more information on Arzeda, please visit: https://arzeda Com/Com
Towards Arzeda
Since 2008, Arzeda has been using the power of computational and synthetic biology to create new enzymes and chemical products that can compete for performance, cost and sustainability. In partnership with Fortune 500 companies and industry leaders, the company has developed a portfolio of enzymes and specialty chemicals for polymers, advanced materials and health and nutrition products. Arzeda’s proprietary platform and validation process quickly create “cell factories” that can be used on an industrial scale to solve problems and create opportunities that would otherwise be impossible. More information can be found at www Arzeda’s Come on,
On the OS Fund
The OS Fund finances and supports inventors and scientists who are targeting breakthroughs on some of the most challenging issues facing our world today. Our mission is to partner with tech pioneers to improve the lives of billions of people around the world for generations to come.
Just as computers have operating systems at their core—dictating the way a computer works and serving as the foundation on which all applications are built—everything in life has an operating system (OS)
We are partnering with entrepreneurs who are rewriting life operating systems for the benefit of humanity.
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