Ailurus Biotechnology Secures Tens of Millions in Angel Funding to Advance IT-Driven Synthetic Biology Platform

VCBeat learned at the earliest opportunity,Ailurus Biotechnology (Shenzhen Xunzhu Biotechnology Co., Ltd.), an IT-enabled synthetic biology platform company, has completed tens of millions of yuan in angel financing.This round of financing was led by Zhilin Capital, with follow-on investments from Wuyuan Capital and MiraclePlus, a previous investor. The funds raised in this round will be used by Ailurus Biotechnology forAilurus vec™ platform operations, the launch of a new platform, and industrial ecosystem development.

Ailurus Biotechnology, founded in October 2020, is the world’s first biological computing company. Headquartered in Shenzhen Bay, the company operates laboratories in Shenzhen and Suzhou, with regional offices in North America and Europe. As a platform enterprise, Ailurus Biotechnology is dedicated to establishing a “standard language” for biological experiments, enabling the “IT transformation” of biotech—programming cells akin to computer coding and assembling life systems like LEGO bricks—to make biological product development as simple and efficient as software development.

The genesis of synthetic biology lies in the aspiration of scientists from diverse disciplinary backgrounds to view cells as programmable “computers,” thereby using DNA as a coding language to control organismal behavior. Ailurus Biotechnology goes a step further by integrating computer science theories with biological tools to construct a novel experimental methodology—"Ultra-Large-Scale Parallel Experimentation"。

Guided by this methodology, Ailurus Biotechnology is developing a series of ultra-high-throughput experimental platforms and opening them to bioengineers and R&D scientists worldwide, providing remotely operable “cloud lab” solutions.Compared with existing laboratory automation methods, Ailurus Biotechnology’s platform delivers a 1-million-fold increase in wet-lab throughput at just 1% of the cost.

In June this year, Ailurus Biotechnology launched its first cloud-based vector testing platform—Ailurus vec™ (abbreviated asA. vec), the platform provides ultra-high-throughput, ultra-low-cost vector testing assays for protein expression optimization. Users need only submit their protein sequences of interest to accessA. vecAchieve an optimized expression vector sequence through high-throughput experimentation on the platform. Current versionA. vec 1.1 Encompasses over 100 billion expression vectors, with vast amounts of experimental data driving machine learning models to continuously generate new vector sequences.

Ailurus Biotechnology stated that future R&D scientists and bioengineers will be able to access its cloud-based laboratory platform anytime, anywhere, remotely validating their innovative ideas. This infrastructure will not only deliver significant efficiency gains for existing biotechnology-related industries but also give rise to entirely new research paradigms and industrial ecosystems beyond current imagination.

Furthermore, to foster collaboration across various communities within the engineering biology industry and cultivate a more robust ecosystem to support the development of biotechnology products, Ailurus Biotechnology initiated and hosted the Synbiopunk & Bio-Developer Conference Series. The inaugural in-person event of this series, Synbiopunk 2021, was successfully held in Shanghai on October 9–10 this year. The conference brought together numerous leading industry enterprises, startups, and top-tier investment institutions, marking the launch of the industry’s ecosystem development.

Ailurus Biotechnology boasts a founding team that is young, open-minded, and driven by both academic ideals and entrepreneurial spirit.Founder and CEO, Guo HaotianPh.D. from the University of Paris, with 10 years of in-depth expertise in synthetic biology. Pioneered the world’s first artificial bacterial organelles. Currently serves as an Elite Mentor for the Tsien Hsue-shen Class and the X-University Program at Tsinghua University.Jiang Shan, Co-founder and COO of the Company, completed undergraduate studies at the University of Edinburgh and engaged in bioengineering research for six years. Led the team to win the Grand Prize at the 2018 International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM). Other members of the R&D team are graduates of top-tier domestic and international institutions, including ETH Zurich, the University of Oxford, and Peking University, and possess strong interdisciplinary backgrounds.

In May 2020, the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) pointed out in its report titled “The Bio Revolution: Innovations Transforming Economies, Societies, and Our Lives,”By 2030–2040, the synthetic biology technology revolution is projected to generate $2–4 trillion in annual direct economic benefits globally.Furthermore, the report also points out thatPlatform enterprises that “sell shovels” in this gold rush will also gain significant commercial advantages through declining marginal costs and data-driven innovation.

As we can see, Ginkgo Bioworks, a synthetic biology service platform, and NRGene, a genomic data analysis platform—two representative companies that went public in 2021—have currently reached market capitalizations of $24 billion and $14 billion, respectively. How will Ailurus Biotechnology, an emerging synthetic biology platform newly entering the industry landscape, further illustrate the ideal blueprint for the “IT-ization” of biotech? We wait and see.

Jiang Haotian, Founding Partner of Zhilin Capital, stated: “The convergence of ‘BT+IT’ is one of the key investment areas focused on by Zhilin Capital. The young team led by Dr. Guo Haotian employs novel methodologies and demonstrates strong interdisciplinary capabilities, completing the R&D and market validation of its first-generation vector testing platform in just one year. We believe that the platform-based solution advocated by Ailurus Biotechnology, which integrates parallel high-throughput experimentation with deep learning, will play a significant role in driving industry development and fostering the formation of an upstream and downstream ecosystem.”

Jing Xutian, Managing Director at Source Code Capital, stated: “By leveraging synthetic biology as a foundational tool and integrating fundamental principles from multiple interdisciplinary sciences, Ailurus Biotechnology can increase the throughput of many traditional experiments by several orders of magnitude. It also has the potential to achieve full-process automation—from experimental design to ultra-high-throughput experimentation and optimization—thereby driving extreme efficiency gains across numerous sectors, including pharmaceuticals, scientific research, and chemical engineering.”

Mao Shengbo, Partner at MiraclePlus, stated: “We are highly optimistic about the broad direction of biological digitization and the young, insightful team at Ailurus Biotechnology. Leroy Hood, one of the founders of systems biology, proposed that biology should be regarded as an information science—namely, bioinformatics and computational biology. The biological digitization pursued by Ailurus Biotechnology is, in essence, mathematics. Mathematics can reveal a more authentic nature for immediate practical application, and it can also transcend nature to uncover the unknown beyond it.”