The Technology UnStack: Culture Bio’s $15M Series A confirms a shift in biotechnology R&D

March 4, 2020 |

In California, Culture Biosciences, the South San Francisco biotech company making biomanufacturing a digital experience, announced today a Series A financing of $15M, led by Cultivian Sandbox Ventures with participation from The Production Board and existing investors Verily Life Sciences, Section 32, YCombinator, and E14 Fund. Dan Phillips, Managing Director at Cultivian Sandbox, and David Friedberg, Founder and CEO of the Production Board, will both join Culture’s Board of Directors.

The Digest named Culture Bio one of its NEXT 50 Companies to Disrupt the World last fall, and Culture Biosciences has grown rapidly since announcing a $5.5M seed round and launching its service only one year ago.

Let’s look at the growth, and the what and the why, and see what that portends for industrial biotechnology.

What does Culture Bio do, anyway?

Culture Biosciences is a technology company in South San Francisco, CA, that offers companies a faster and more efficient way to do biomanufacturing R&D.

Using Culture Bioscience’s cloud bioreactor platform, bioprocess scientists design and analyze experiments using Culture’s bioreactors, without the expense and time needed to build out entirely a “our very own everything” lab. Thus, they can spend more time designing and analyzing experiments, and spend less capex in the process. Culture’s cloud bioreactors offer full control of experimental design and allow real-time monitoring and live process changes. Beyond generating more data more quickly, Culture’s platform provides advanced data visualization and analytics tools to generate new insights into bioprocesses.

What’s Going On?

The old technology stack is being unbundled by a new generation of service providers. In the old days, a company built out a strain engineering center of excellence, strain optimization center of excellence strain characterization in some cases, a process design center of excellence, a test center filled with bioreactors, a pilot plant, and so on and so on. Everything had to be built in-house, because it was the only way. The cost was formidable, the timelines strained the payback models of venture investors. It felt like there were more centers at some companies than in the National Basketball Association.

Sometimes, it was a simple yet remarkable problem of having to wait 12 months or more for key equipment to arrive. All of that made scale-up worse, slower, costlier — the opposite of the “better, faster, cheaper” that generally ventures aim for.

How much faster, how much cheaper?

What does it cost to actually build out a lab all by your onesey. Since the alternative is an outside provider like Culture Bio, they’ve simplified the comparison with a handy tool, here:

It’s not exactly the Pepsi Challenge, or the Bucket Challenge, but its more worthwhile in its own way and you can find out all about it here.

Now, speed, transparency, capex reduction. All kinds of advantages. What’s keeping every company in industrial biotech and pharma from shifting to this model? For one, the new service providers will have bandwidth and economies of scale constraints for a while — which the cap raises will help with.

Plus, there’s the factor of trust. Companies that had everything in-house are now having to learn to work via the cloud. There will be pioneers, early adopters and late adopters as with any tech wave. What they’ll find in time is that the Cloud is just as transparent (to mix our metaphors) as any in-house team. And, they’ll find that things that had to be done serially can be now done in parallel. More speed and cost gains.

But the stack is unbundled and won’t be bundled up again, ever.

The Key Achievements

Culture Bio hasn’t posted a brag sheet online, so here’s one you can use.

• Scaling its cloud bioreactor infrastructure, increasing capacity five-fold

• Growing its client base to over thirty customers, ranging from startups to Fortune 50 companies

• Launching live data monitoring and visualization capabilities so customers can understand their experimental results in real-time

• Expanding from fermentation into mammalian cell culture

Who’s Working with them?

It’s a Who’s Who that we already know about. Pivot Bio, Zymergen, Nektar, Clara Foods, Modern Meadow, C16, Geltor, Boost Biomes, Synlogic, and Asimov. At least 10 more are not yet disclosed — already, though, that’s a master list of almost everyone in the hottest chairs in the Bay Area.

What’s the fresh capital for, exactly?

This new funding will be used to triple Culture’s current bioreactor capacity and to develop additional software tools to further digitize biomanufacturing R&D. “To date, we have provided biotech customers an on-demand way of running bioreactors, and given them the ability to monitor their experiments and visualize their data in the cloud,” explains Will Patrick. “This funding will support our goal of making biomanufacturing R&D a digital experience by enabling scientists to manage their entire R&D workflow in our software application.”

Reaction from the stakeholders

“We’re so excited to be working with our diverse group of investors who have expertise in the various industries that are doing biomanufacturing,” says CEO Will Patrick. “The next generation of breakthrough products across industries will be biomanufactured: our customers use biology to produce everything from novel therapeutics to food proteins to renewable chemicals and materials. These companies have all historically struggled with slow and inflexible legacy approaches to scaling up their lab discoveries to commercial production. Our goal is to enable them to develop and scale their bioprocesses in less time, helping to bring their transformational bioproducts to market sooner.”

“We have learned that the key challenge to commercializing new bio-based products is developing and scaling manufacturing processes in a cost efficient and timely manner,” says Dan Phillips of Cultivian Sandbox. “We’ve watched many companies try to solve the same scaling challenges by investing in expensive R&D and production facilities and/or struggling to scale processes through contract manufacturers. We think Culture is perfectly positioned to develop new technologies that solve these challenges, enabling the entire industry to flourish.”

“Culture is poised to offer the industry new design and analytics tools to improve processes beyond what is possible today,” says David Friedberg of The Production Board. “By leveraging the massive amounts of structured data that they generate for customers, they are positioned to bring AI and machine learning into biomanufacturing in an impactful way.”

More on the story

www.culturebiosciences.com

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