State-Owned Capital Backs Tsinghua-Affiliated AI & Synthetic Bio-Manufacturing Firm KansenBio in Tens of Millions of Yuan Pre-Series A Financing

VCBeat has learned that KansenBio Co., Ltd., a biomanufacturing enterprise, recently announced the completion of its Pre-A financing round, raising tens of millions of yuan. The round was jointly invested by Beijing Green Energy and Low-Carbon Industry Investment Fund under Beijing State-Owned Capital Operation and Management Co., Ltd., as well as Beijing Future Star Venture Capital Center and Beijing Changjianfa Investment Management Center affiliated with Future Science City Group. The capital injection reflects the full recognition of the company's technological approach and industrialization prospects by municipal and district governments, and aligns with the national strategic layout for bio-manufacturing in the 15th Five-Year Plan for emerging industries.

This round of financing will be primarily used to: accelerate process scale-up and capacity building for high-value product pipelines; advance international certification of core raw materials and expand into global markets; and initiate preliminary engineering for the next generation of large-scale production lines.

Founded in July 2022, KansenBio is a national high-tech enterprise spun off from core technological achievements of Tsinghua University. Focusing on active ingredients for the big health sector and bio-based materials, the innovative bio-manufacturer strives to achieve independent and eco-friendly production of key chemicals via synthetic biology technologies, breaking the long-standing bottleneck of reliance on imports. The company has obtained multiple qualifications, including the title of National High-Tech Enterprise and Beijing Specialized, Refined, Differential and Innovative Small and Medium-sized Enterprise.

Prior to this round of financing, KansenBio had secured nearly RMB 100 million in investments from renowned institutions including China Merchants Venture, China Creation Ventures, TusStar, Changzhou Hi - Tech Jinlong Holdings Co., Ltd., and Cenglin Capital.

Synthetic biology, as a disruptive technology leading the “Third Biotechnology Revolution,” is reshaping the manufacturing pathways for bulk chemicals and high-value functional ingredients. However, many teams in the industry are constrained by the conversion efficiency of natural metabolic pathways, making it difficult to achieve both economic viability and scalable production.

KansenBio boasts an internationally leading synthetic biology technology platform as its core competitive edge. The company integrates computational biology, AI-driven biological component design, large-scale genome editing, construction of unnatural metabolic pathways and robust industrial scale-up capabilities. Supported by an enzyme library of over 10,000 varieties and more than ten industrial microbial chassis, it has built a full-spectrum core technology system spanning R&D to industrialization.

KansenBio is positioned as a biomanufacturing enterprise focused on active ingredients for general health and bio-based materials. Leveraging Tsinghua University’s decades of expertise in synthetic biology and its proprietary “Non-Natural Pathway Biosynthesis” platform, integrating core technologies such as AI-driven design and optimization of biosynthetic pathways, high-throughput construction of microbial strains, intelligent fermentation process development and scale-up, enzymatic catalytic conversion and product purification process optimization, equipment R&D, and process integration, to achieve green, low-carbon biological manufacturing of high-end chemicals.

Centered on its AI-powered bioinformatics platform, KansenBio combines an enzyme library of over 10,000 types and more than ten industrial microbial chassis. Leveraging protein large language models and intelligent metabolic regulation technologies, the company has established a full-cycle AI closed loop of "Design-Build-Test-Learn". With self-developed AI-based enzyme design, large-scale network simulation and intelligent regulation technologies, the platform seamlessly integrates computational biology, enzyme engineering and multi-omics metabolic engineering. It connects the entire workflow from strain design to large-scale production, enabling reliable transformation from micro-level genetic programming to macro-scale mass manufacturing.

The intelligent platform is backed by KansenBio’s elite dual team of scientists and industrialization experts. Dr. Chen Zhen, Founder and Chief Scientist, is a tenured associate professor at Tsinghua University. He studied under Professor Liu Dehua, Foreign Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and Professor Zeng Anping, the first Chinese Fellow of the German National Academy of Sciences and Engineering, and was honored as a Future Chemical Engineering Scholar. He successfully industrialized the synthetic biology technology for 1,3-propanediol with an annual output of ten thousand tons, breaking the long-term monopoly held by DuPont. Dr. Chen Jiaqi serves as CEO. A former senior technical and business manager at Shell and a high-level overseas talent in Beijing, he has over a decade of practical experience in technology commercialization at Fortune Global 500 companies. Many core team members graduate from top institutions including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Tokyo Institute of Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The engineering and production teams consist of seasoned professionals from renowned enterprises in the industry. Professor Liu Dehua, Director of the Institute of Applied Chemistry at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Tsinghua University and Foreign Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, acts as the chief consultant to offer strategic guidance.

To date, the company has filed for and been granted over 40 domestic and international invention patents. Its core technological achievements have not only won multiple international honors, including the Gold Medal at the Nuremberg International Invention Exhibition in Germany and the Gold Medal at the Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions. Its technical strength and raw material quality have also received high recognition from multiple industry awards.

Left: China Quality Raw Material Award; Right: Nuremberg International Invention Exhibition · Gold Medal

In terms of product pipeline, KansenBio adopts an in-depth layout strategy featuring rapid commercialization in the short term and development of low-carbon materials for long-term strategic goals, focusing on two major business directions:

In the nutrition and health sector, one of KansenBio's core products, sialic acid, has obtained substantive equivalence recognition as a new food ingredient derived from synthetic biology issued by the National Health Commission of China. This recognition features a long review cycle, high access thresholds and great scarcity, serving as a key compliance permit for the domestic food and big health market. Additionally, the company has realized domestic production of L-histidine, an essential amino acid for children, ending the long-term overseas monopoly. It is also advancing independent R&D of core raw materials for high-end antibiotics to underpin pharmaceutical security. The company has built up a pipeline of functional raw materials covering specialty amino acids and their downstream derivatives, which are poised for mass production.

In the field of bio-based materials, leveraging its proprietary platform technologies, the company has built a product portfolio covering key monomers such as diols, diamines and hydroxy fatty acids. Bio-based 1,3-butanediol is one of the most widely used raw materials in the cosmetics industry. KansenBio is the only domestic player and one of only two worldwide capable of producing it via biological methods, with production costs over 30% lower than the chemical synthesis route. As a premium precursor for degradable plastics and spandex, bio-based 1,4-butanediol boasts a market size worth tens of billions of yuan. Furthermore, the company holds the world's exclusive technology for biosynthesizing hexamethylenediamine using glucose as feedstock, which is expected to fundamentally resolve the supply bottleneck of raw materials for nylon 66.

To support rapid production line scale-up, KansenBio has completed the construction of its first industrial demonstration platform in Xinbei District, Changzhou. Officially put into operation in May 2025, the facility enables stable mass production and ton-scale flexible manufacturing of multiple high-value small-molecule raw materials.

On-Site View of KansenBio Factory 

As a key representative of new productive forces, synthetic biology is transitioning from the technology validation phase to industrialization realization phase. The joint investment by Beijing's state-owned capital entities not only recognizes KansenBio's technological strengths in bio-based material monomers, amino acids and their derivatives, but also reflects the forward-looking layout of state-owned capital in the green bio-manufacturing track under the dual carbon goals.