Sofinnova et al. invest £1.3m in Synthace

Ellie Pullen
25 September 2013

Tweet
Facebook
LinkedIn
Google plus
Send to

Sofinnova Partners has led a ТЃ1.3m funding round for Synthace, a London-based applied synthetic bioengineering company, alongside a syndicate of angel investors.

The fresh capital will be used by Synthace to pursue production of its first chemical products at scale. The company also plans on using the funds to form partnerships with chemical industry players, to eventually take its products to market.

Sofinnova backed the company via its Green Seed Fund, which held its first close in December last year on €22.5m. The Green Seed Fund is focused exclusively on making seed investments to European companies operating in the renewable chemistry and industrial biotechnology industries. CDC Enterprises and industry players Solvay, Sofiprotéol and Unigrains are LPs of the fund, which is managed by Sofinnova partner Joško Bobanović.

In conjunction with the equity injection from Sofinnova and the angel syndicate, Synthace has also secured a £500,000 Technology Strategy Board award from University College London (UCL) and the University of Manchester.

The transaction is believed to mark the second investment from Sofinnova's Green Seed Fund. The first took place in February this year, when the firm jointly injected €2.2m into Finnish start-up MetGen with Finnvera and Finnish Industry Investment.

Company
Synthace is headquartered in London and was founded in 2012 as a spinout from UCL. The company engineers biological systems for the production of speciality chemicals. It does so by harnessing the abilities of micro-organisms from feedstocks to produce chemical products.

Synthace's technology platform, which allows the company to rapidly engineer its products, uses big data analysis with wet lab experimental design and molecular biology tools. Wet labs are laboratories where chemicals or biological materials are handled in liquid solutions.

People
Tim Fell is the CEO of Synthace, while CTO Sean Ward is the company's founder. Sofinnova partner Joško Bobanović is the manager of the firm's Green Seed Fund and has taken up a seat on Synthace's board of directors.