London-based biotech company Bactobio raises €6.9M: Know more

London-based Bactobio, a biotechnology company, announced on Monday that it has secured £6M (approximately €6.9M) in an oversubscribed bridge financing round led by Bridford Group. 

New investors, such as the founders of the London-based fintech unicorn Lendable and Entangle Group, as well as angel investors, including Peder Holk Nielsen (Former CEO and President of Novozymes) and Hugh Grant (Former Chairman and CEO of Monsanto), also participated in the round. 

The UK company says it will use the funds to advance Bactobio’s pioneering discovery pipeline and enable the characterisation of the next generation of antimicrobial solutions.

The funding comes one month after raising a Smart grant from Innovate UK, the UK’s Innovation Agency. The £342K is Bactobio’s first antifungal-focused funding and fifth Innovate UK success. 

“With our 2021 fundraising, we built a complete end-to-end compound discovery pipeline. Today’s raise supports our continued drive towards automation and data-driven science that will help turn our captured biodiversity into commercial products,” says Dr. Daniel Hansen, CEO, and Founder of Bactobio. “We are immensely proud to receive such a high level of new and continued support from high calibre investors.”

Bactobio: What you need to know

Founded by Dr. Daniel Hansen, Bactobio uses synthetic biology, next-generation sequencing, and machine learning to culture the 99 per cent of microbes that have previously been unculturable. 

The company says it allows them to gain exclusive access to nature’s greatest untapped bioresource to discover novel chemical and biological solutions across the pharmaceutical, agricultural and chemical industries. 

Currently, the company’s first target is the growing antimicrobial resistance crisis.

Dr. Mark Wilkinson, CSO at Bactobio, says, “It is estimated that fewer than 3 per cent of the potential natural products encoded in nature have been identified to date. Bactobio’s bioactivity-driven but target-agnostic approach lets nature do the work and lead us toward compounds that have been unimaginable and previously inaccessible to drug discovery efforts. Funds from this round will allow us to dig deeper into this previously untapped bioresource.”