Veminsyn Secures Nearly RMB 100 Million Series A Funding Led by CITIC Capital to Advance Bioactive Materials Innovation

As an emerging force in the field of biomanufacturing, Weiming Shiguang, an innovative platform for novel bioactive materials, announced that it has recently completed a Series A financing round of nearly RMB 100 million. The round was led by CITIC Capital’s private equity investment arm (CITIC Capital Partners), with participation from the Yangtze River Metallurgical Industrial Park and existing shareholders ZhenFund, Jiacheng Capital, and Hony Capital.Gaohu Capital Serves as Exclusive Financial Advisor, the funds raised will be primarily used for product research and development, team building, and production capacity expansion.

Synthetic Biology was established in May 2021 as a biotechnology company specializing in the innovative R&D and manufacturing of bioactive materials for the beauty and personal care sector. Dedicated to discovering high-value bioactive ingredients, the company leverages next-generation biosynthesis technologies to achieve low-carbon production of bioactive materials. It provides downstream clients with premium, safe, effective, and eco-friendly raw materials, and has become an upstream ingredient supplier for numerous well-known industry brands, including Zhu Ben, Helius, Bloomage Biotech, Fujian, Huaxi Ko, Life Lab, Annocox, and KATO.

Dr. Zhao Yaran, Founder of Synthetic Biologystated: “With the advancement of biotechnology, the world is undergoing a transition from traditional chemical production to low-carbon bio-manufacturing. Grounded in innovation in bioactive materials, we focus on the beauty and personal care sector, aiming to continuously expand into more diversified downstream products and broader international markets, ultimately becoming a globally leading supplier of bioactive materials with innovative capabilities. Citic Capital possesses extensive investment experience in the beauty and consumer sectors, as well as downstream industrial resources. We believe that with Citic Capital’s financial investment and empowerment across the industry chain, Synthetic biology will gain significant development opportunities and work with customers to create a more enjoyable and promising future life.”

Zhao Lei, Senior Managing Director at Citic Capitalstated: “As an emerging leader in the field of synthetic biology, Weiming Shiguang boasts a robust in-house R&D platform, comprehensive manufacturing capabilities, a diverse product portfolio, and professional commercialization expertise. We are delighted to collaborate with Weiming Shiguang’s young and dynamic management team. By leveraging our extensive resources from portfolio companies in the beauty and consumer sectors, we will continue to add value to the company’s growth and support the development and expansion of Chinese synthetic biology enterprises.”

Currently, China’s beauty and cosmetics consumer market ranks first globally in size and continues to maintain rapid growth. Goldman Sachs research indicates that its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) reaches 11%, doubling every six years, with the market size projected to reach $145 billion by 2025. In recent years, driven by the “new consumption” trend and internet-based marketing models, the “soft power” of domestic Chinese beauty brands has continuously strengthened, with brand influence and sales market share rising steadily. However, over 90% of the raw material supply for domestic products relies on imports or domestic imitations, highlighting an urgent need to address the shortfall in “hard power” innovation in upstream raw materials. Traditional creation of beauty ingredient components is primarily based on chemical synthesis, resulting in a rigid industry innovation paradigm, high technical barriers, and saturated product space. This makes it difficult for domestic brands to break through via “source-level” innovation, leading to severe product homogenization.

Creating new bioactive materials through more “flexible, efficient, and low-carbon” biosynthetic approaches has become an inevitable trend in the innovation of future cosmetic ingredients, with bioactive materials such as active peptides and proteins being rapidly adopted in the cosmetics industry. This new innovation paradigm provides a historic opportunity for China’s cosmetics industry to take the lead in “source” innovation and build “authentic Chinese brands” with stronger global competitiveness and higher premium potential. In response to this trend, Synthetic Biology has emerged.

Synthetic biology, through its independently developed Vemin platform, has pioneered a complete biological intelligent manufacturing innovation chain in the field of innovative bioactive ingredients for cosmetic raw materials, seamlessly integrating “Ingredient Discovery – Design and Construction – Scaled Manufacturing.” Leveraging the Vemin platform’s proprietary high-throughput bioactive ingredient discovery technology and a database containing tens of billions of bioactive molecules, the company achieves a new active molecule discovery efficiency one hundred times greater than that of traditional technologies. It possesses engineered capabilities to rapidly design and efficiently implement production solutions, has already achieved scaled production and sales of a series of novel bioactive materials, and expects to complete construction of its own GMP-certified factory within the year. Synthetic biology’s “source-level” innovation capability will significantly fill the gap in “hard power” resources required by downstream beauty and personal care brands for diverse and personalized innovative raw material ingredients in their end products. The newly launched raw material Time-COL17™-001, which has already achieved scaled production and market expansion, retains the activity of Type XVII collagen while enabling its absorption through topical skincare application, thereby greatly expanding the application scenarios and product forms available to downstream skincare brands.

Synthetic Biology has established an open innovation ecosystem integrating industry, academia, and research through the creation of Vemin Lab. By forging deep collaborations with top-tier biomedical research institutions such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, China Agricultural University, and South China University of Technology, it accelerates the translation and commercialization of cutting-edge achievements in the creation of novel bioactive materials, while ensuring a continuous supply of high-end R&D talent for the enterprise. Vemin Lab will increase its investment to conduct forward-looking R&D focused on the discovery of plant-derived bioactive ingredients with greater complexity and development potential, as well as on cell factory construction and mass production technologies. This strategy aims to further expand the company’s product portfolio and technological advantages in the field of novel bioactive material creation, integrate upstream and downstream resources, continuously inject innovative vitality into the industry, and establish itself as the innovative “source” and industry leader for bioactive raw materials in the global beauty industry.