BEIJING, Aug. 2, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Recently, Atantares announced the completion of Pre-A and Pre-A+ financing all around RMB100 million. The Pre-A round is led by Asia Green Fund, followed by Fosun Health Capital and existing investors Frees Fund, Qiming Venture Partners, Next Capital, and NeuX Capital; Pre-A+ is exclusively invested by Alibaba Health. The fund will mainly go towards the R&D of products, service operation, and capacity expansion.
Founded in 2021, Atantares’ vision is to develop molecular chips by using integrated circuits or other semiconductor technologies to drive the semiconductor of biotechnology. The first application of the company is high-throughput DNA synthesis, aiming at exponentially reducing the cost of DNA synthesis through the gene synthesis technology of CMOS chips. Nowadays the first generation of short-chain CMOS chips independently developed by Atantares has been successfully taped out. In addition, Atantares has also strategically laid out the enzymatic biological method. These two methods are complementary paths for DNA synthesis. At present, the company is developing new controllable strategies to improve enzyme efficiency and automatic methods to adapt to enzymatic synthesis.
Dr. Kuan Huang, Managing Director of Asia Green Fund, said: “The combination of semiconductor and biotechnology makes gene synthesis and sequencing, these underlying technologies evolve at a speed exceeding ‘Moore’s Law’, which is the core driving force for the rapid development of bio-manufacturing in the 21st century. Atantares has integrated the worldwide top teams in the fields of semiconductor, microfluidic and molecular biology, demonstrated excellent execution in commercialization and service capabilities, and has successfully taped out the first generation of self-developed gene synthesis chip in China. At the same time, through the ultra-high throughput biochip, biological R&D has made massive improvements in reagent use efficiency, waste discharge, and recycling, which is an important driving force for the green and sustainable development of bio-manufacturing. We expect Atantares to continue to overcome difficulties and become a global leader in the strategic competition for underlying technologies like long-chain DNA synthesis and gene storage, etc. “