Synthetic biology company EnginZyme, recently announced that it has raised €6.4mn in Series A investment led by Sofinnova Partners. With the new investment, the company’s total funding stands over €10mn.
The company plans to use these funds to accelerate the development of EnginZyme’s technology platform and take its first internal production process to pilot.
The company also announced that Michael Krel, Partner of the Sofinnova Industrial Biotech Fund, will join EnginZyme’s Board of Directors.
“Sofinnova Partners brings a deep industrial experience, which makes them the perfect partner for us,” said EnginZyme CEO Dr. Karim Engelmark Cassimjee. “This is a complex field, so it is important to have investors that can provide not only the financial support but also strategic guidance. With over a decade of experience investing in industrial biotechnology, there are few investors as well placed as Sofinnova Partners to bring this domain expertise to the table.”
“There’s never been a more important time to provide solid, long-term support to pioneering companies in industrial biotechnology,” said Michael Krel, Partner of the Sofinnova Industrial Biotech Fund. “We strongly believe in EnginZyme’s outstanding team and the potential of its technology to join the power of biology with the efficiency of chemical engineering to bring us towards a more sustainable future.”
EnginZyme seeks to solve one of the fundamental problems of our time: How to produce sustainable alternatives to plastics, nylons, rubbers, and the tons of other synthetics that are used on a daily basis, without compromising on cost-effectiveness. To achieve this, EnginZyme’s technology platform combines the breadth and power of nature (enzymatic cascades) with the efficiency of the chemical industry (packed bed reactors) in a best-of-both-worlds technical solution.
“It has long been recognized that if we could effectively access nature’s full palette of molecules, we could solve many of the world’s most pressing problems,” said Dr. Engelmark Cassimjee. “There’s just so much more you can do with biological systems than with traditional catalysts and petroleum-based building blocks. But the key word here is ‘effectively’ — it needs to be as cheap and easy to scale as the chemical solutions we’ve used for more than a century now. We’re the first company to truly address that and by doing so we are building foundational technology for an entire future industry.”
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