Culture empowers its customers to develop and scale their bioprocesses in less time, helping bring transformational bioproducts to market sooner.

 

South San Francisco, CA, March 4th, 2020 -  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. 

 

“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.”

 

Culture Biosciences has grown rapidly since announcing a $5.5M seed round and launching its service only one year ago. Key achievements include:

  • 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  

 

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.”

 

"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.”



About Culture Biosciences

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. By leveraging Culture Bioscience’s cloud bioreactor platform, bioprocess scientists can spend more time designing and analyzing experiments. 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. To learn more, please visit www.culturebiosciences.com or connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn. 



About Cultivian Sandbox Ventures

Based in Chicago, Cultivian Sandbox is a venture capital firm that invests in innovative technology companies transforming food and agriculture. To support these companies in their growth, the team leverages decades of experience in the food and agriculture sector, a network of market-leading strategic partners, and a track record of multi-stage institutional investing. For more information, visit www.cultiviansbx.com or connect with us on Twitter and LinkedIn.