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Spider silk startup Bolt Threads closes on $123 million in Series D funding
Bolt Threads, the startup making spider silk from microbugs, has raised a giant $123 million Series D round of funding. As we reported in November, an SEC filing showed the company had raised $106 million from Foundation Capital and Formation 8. Bolt now tells TechCrunch it has added to that amount, bringing up its total to $147 million raised so far. Read More
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It’s surprisingly easy to program living tissue to form new 3D shapes
The boundary between biology and technology blurs further and further as researchers discover more and more parallels between the two. Today they have found that it’s relatively simple to essentially hack living tissue by programming a pattern into cells, making them grow and fold on their own into a desired shape. Read More
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A look at 42 women in tech who crushed it in 2017
What a challenging, exhilarating year it has been for women everywhere, starting from the women’s March on Washington to former Uber engineer Susan Fowler’s eye-opening and now famous blog post to the #metoo movement that has swept the country, washing dozens of sexual predators out of their powerful roles in the process. All the while, women in tech have been driving their… Read More
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Bio-programming toolkit maker Asimov launches with $4.7M from Andreessen Horowitz
Biotech is one of today’s many hot tech frontiers, but one thing holding it back is that it’s significantly less amenable to traditional computing techniques than other areas. A new startup is working on bridging the gap between the digital and the biological by creating a set of computer-aided biology design tools. It’s a prescient enough idea that it has attracted $4.7… Read More
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Ginkgo Bioworks secures $275 million in Series D, valuing the company at over $1 billion
Boston biotech startup Ginkgo Bioworks has announced the raise of $275 million in Series D funding to build out its Bioworks3 production facility. The funding comes from previous investors Viking Global, Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, Cascade Investment, Bill Gates, as well as new investor, General Atlantic. The company previously raised over $154 million, bringing the total up to… Read More
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Andreessen Horowitz has a new, $450 million bio fund
Almost exactly two years ago, the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz took the wraps off a $200 million “biofund” that aimed to invest at the intersection of biology and engineering and was being led by its (then) new general partner, Vijay Pande. Pande argued at the time that it was finally possible to invest in software-enabled biotech ideas — without having to wait eons for… Read More
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Fractyl Labs raises $44 million in Series D to develop a treatment for type 2 diabetes
Fractyl Labs, a Lexington, Massachusetts-based startup developing treatments for diabetes, has raised $44 million in Series D financing from a slew of VC firms, including GV, True Ventures, the IDO Fund, General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Domain Associates, Mithril Capital Management, Emergent Medical Partners, L.P., and Deerfield Management Company, L.P. Fractyl has been working on… Read More
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uBiome launches an at-home women’s health test for HPV, STI’s and bacterial vaginosis
SmartJane is a new women’s health test out from uBiome today that promises to check for 23 vaginal flora as well as 19 strains of the human papilloma virus and a string of sexually transmitted diseases like Chlamydia and gonorrhea from the comfort of your own home. uBiome, which launched in 2012 to sequence and study the human microbiome, is best known for its at-home gut health test… Read More
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Bolt Threads is raising $106 million from Foundation Capital and Formation 8
Our spidey senses are tingling over here. According to an SEC filing, TechCrunch has learned Bolt Threads, the biotech company spinning microbes into spider silk, is raising a whopping $106 million in Series D financing. Bolt Threads has been on a meteoric rise since it first told TC about its ambitious endeavor to make spider silk, a material stronger than teflon but softer than a cloud. Read More
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CRISPR’d pigs could produce low-fat bacon
We truly live in amazing times. Chinese scientists just made skinnier pigs using CRISPR-Cas9 technology. Do you know what this means? Low-fat bacon! I know, I know, for some, bacon without the fat does not sound that appealing. But for those watching their weight and missing the crispy taste of sizzled pig slices, there’s this brand new development. Read More
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Drug discovery startup Recursion raises $60 million in Series B from Data Collective
Recursion, a drug discovery startup out of Salt Lake City, Utah has announced a $60 million Series B round, led by Data Collective (DCVC). Recursion started out in 2014 on a mission to identify 100 new treatments in 10 years. That’s a lofty goal, considering the discovery for just one drug can traditionally take decades and tens of millions of dollars, with a high rate of failure… Read More
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Eligo Bioscience raises $20 million to target the microbiome more precisely
French startup Eligo Bioscience just raised $20 million to develop next-gen biotherapeutics. Khosla Ventures is leading the round. This is also Khosla Ventures’ first investment in a French startup. Existing investor Seventure Partners is also participating, and the startup received a $2 million grant from the Worldwide Innovation Challenge. Eligo Bioscience has been working on a new way… Read More
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Facebook drops no-vote stock plan, Zuck will sell shares to fund philanthropy
Mark Zuckerberg has gotten so rich that he can fund his philanthropic foundation and retain voting control without Facebook having to issue a proposed non-voting class of stock that faced shareholder resistance. Today Facebook announced that it’s withdrawn its plan to issue Class C no-vote stock and has resolved the shareholder lawsuit seeking to block the corporate governance overhaul. Read More
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Ourotech is taking the guesswork out of cancer treatment
Every day spent with late stage cancer matters — that’s why it’s so important to get treatments right the first time. Unfortunately, despite having dozens of cancer treatments available, we don’t have great processes for determining what treatments to prioritize. The consequence of this is that we often miscalculate and waste critical time pursuing the wrong… Read More
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Breakout Ventures, spun out of Peter Thiel’s Breakout Labs, has closed its debut fund with $60M
Lindy Fishburne has spent most of the last six years heading up Breakout Labs, a program that’s underwritten by Peter Thiel and that in 2011 began offering nascent science-focused startups funding with no strings attached. Little wonder that Fishburne decided it might make sense to enlist her Breakout Labs colleagues and create a more traditional venture fund that can support some of… Read More
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Balderton joins $30M Series D for big data biotech platform play, Sophia Genetics
Switzerland based SaaS startup Sophia Genetics is hoping to give IBM Watson a run for its money in the healthcare diagnostics space. It’s built a big data analytics platform that harnesses clinicians’ medical expertise to enhance genomic diagnostic via AI algorithms — leading, it says, to better and faster diagnoses for patients with diseases such as cancer. Read More
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WuXi NextCODE aims for the genomics database “gold standard” with new $240 million
A lot of money is being poured into genomics lately, including the genomic information company WuXi NextCODE (WXNC), which just announced it has closed on $240 million in Series B financing, led by Sequoia. We tend to hear very little about this company in the tech industry but Chinese tech billionaire Jack Ma is one of its many backers and WXNC is counted among the largest genetic… Read More
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Peter Thiel backs offshore human testing of experimental herpes vaccine
Peter Thiel and a group of libertarians are funding an offshore human clinical trial of a herpes vaccine, skirting FDA regulations and sparking a heated debate over U.S. safety rules. Read More
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Athelas launches a new type of blood testing device for the home
Athelas is launching a low-cost, blood diagnostics device today made for testing certain diseases like the flu, bacterial infections and cancer in the comfort of your home. Tanay Tandon founded the startup in 2014 at the tender age of 17 to develop a smartphone device that could detect malaria through blood samples. That idea proved difficult but the idea of ease and mobility stuck with… Read More
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Y Combinator’s Summer 2017 health care startups to watch
There were quite a few trends this time around for Y Combinator’s popular Demo Day, including a mountain of B2B startups, AI, self-driving technology and of course an industry that continues to surge — health care. Come take a gander at some of the most promising health care startups to emerge from the Summer 2017 class of YC companies. Read More
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