Co-Stone leads $43m round for China biosynthesis player
Co-Stone Capital Management has led a CNY 300m (USD 43m) Series B round for Readline, a Shenzhen-based company that specialises in synthetic biology.
Other investors include Jinhang Group, a fund management entity controlled by the Zhuhai government, consumer electronics manufacturer Gree Group, and Shang Capital. Existing investors Oriental Fortune Capital, Green Pine Capital Partners, and Hunan Caixin Investment re-upped.
Readline raised CNY 200m in Series A funding across two tranches in 2020 and 2021. Oriental Fortune Capital and Leaguer Capital provided an initial CNY 100m and then returned to invest the same amount in a round led by Green Pine Capital Partners. Co-Builder Partners also took part. The company's first investor was Deepshire Investment Management in 2019, according to AVCJ Research.
Established in 2017, Readline claims to be the world's leading "green bio-intelligent manufacturing platform," with competencies such as biocomputing and artificial intelligence, green chemistry, genetic engineering, enzyme engineering, cell engineering, and fermentation engineering. It supplies materials used in skincare, biomedicine, nutrition, animal health, and agricultural products.
"From the outset, our focus on biosynthesis technology has stemmed from a simple desire: to use green production methods to break through the cost and capacity constraints faced by peptides in the field of health consumption," said Jian Lu, co-founder and CEO of Readline, in a statement.
Peptides are short chains of amino acids linked by peptide bonds. They are among the most versatile natural products and can be used to treat a variety of medical conditions.
Advances in synthetic biology and China's carbon-neutral ambitions have prompted investors to re-examine bio-manufacturing. For example, Temasek Holdings recently led a USD 80m Series B for Mojia Biotech. Sento Investment and Lyzz Capital came in as new investors, while Bits x Bites and Asia Green Fund re-upped.
Produced in the traditional way, chemicals are the result of a series of engineered reactions intended to break or reform bonds between atoms. Biosynthesis achieves the same result through enzymatic reactions, drawing on the power of microorganisms and naturally occurring enzymes to turn simple compounds into macromolecules or more complex products.
"It's like cooking – you need the right recipe, with the right microorganisms, the right enzymes, in the right environment, at the right temperature. It's a very difficult process," Bo Bai, a founding partner at Asia Green Fund told AVCJ following the announcement of Mojia's Series B.
Those advances in synthetic biology have dramatically reduced the cost of finalising these recipes, while use cases have blossomed thanks to the formation of databases and big data analysis. Numerous healthcare professionals returning to China from overseas have started targeting the space.
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