BioP2P Staff
Emeryville, California-based Prolific Machines, which uses light to grow and control cells, completed a first close of a $55 million Series B financing that included convertible notes.
Ki Tua Fund, the corporate venture arm of Fonterra Co-operative Group, led the round. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Mayfield, SOSV, Shorewind Capital, Darco Capital, Robert Downey Jr’s Footprint Coalition Ventures, Conti Ventures, In-Q-Tel (IQT), Matthew Katz, and several others also participated in the round.
Prolific Machines is working to develop a more efficient and sustainable way to manufacture critical everyday products, like food and medicine. The company has developed a platform that it said will allow commercial partners to efficiently produce higher-quality biological products across cellular agriculture, nutritional and therapeutic proteins, tissue engineering, disease models, drug screening, and more.
Today’s cellular biology processes, used for everything from making the antibodies necessary for immunotherapies to fermentation used to make the high-value nutritional proteins found in infant formula, are constrained by expensive, inefficient, and imprecise molecular methods. The unparalleled precision of light breaks this control paradigm and allows the company to control virtually any cellular function in any cell type.
The funding will accelerate the company’s platform commercialization via partnerships to be announced in the months ahead.
“We have proven that we can successfully control several cellular processes using light,” said Prolific Machines Co-Founder and CEO, Deniz Kent. “This enables unparalleled control in both the space and the time axes, and this control is critical to making cheaper and higher quality products.”
Read the full release here.