On Thursday, chemical manufacturing disruptor Bota Bio, which designs and produces industrial enzymes and other chemical compounds from sustainable biomaterials, announced that it has raised more than $100 million in an oversubscribed Series B venture round led by Sequoia Capital China. Existing investors including Matrix Partners China, Source Code Capital, Sherpa Healthcare Partners and 5Y Capital renewed their commitments for the round, which brings Bota Bio’s total market funding to $145 million.
The company says it will use the new capital to expand its global operations, and build out Bota Bio’s lab-to-pilot platform–called the “Bota Freeway“–to rapidly scale and roll out its product pipeline in food, pharma, nutrition and consumer goods.
“Most traditional manufacturing comes with a high environmental cost. We are building Bota Bio to innovate solutions that help manufacturers in all industries leverage the power of biology to accelerate the design and scale-up of high-performance products using sustainable processes,” said Cheryl Cui, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO, Bota Bio. “We are empowering a diverse global client base from different industries to develop bio-based alternatives to traditional ingredients. We are thrilled to have this syndicate of renowned investors support our efforts in transforming global manufacturing.”
Founded in 2019 by a team of scientists and industry experts with experience in developing and commercializing industrial-scale bio-based products, Bota Bio has since expanded the traditional field of synthetic biology to develop new downstream processes and non-traditional microbial strains for use in multiple industries. The company’s technology is aimed at the global market for biologically engineered solutions, a sector that the World Economic Forum says could be valued at $10 trillion by the end of 2030. Bota Bio also points to research from the Boston Consulting Group and Hello Tomorrow that $30 trillion in product manufacturing–or 40 percent of global GDP–could be impacted over the next 30 years by biological manufacturing.
“Bota Bio is rapidly delivering bio-based and biologically produced products at scale to replace fossil-fuel-based, energy-intensive products and processes with biologically produced sustainable alternatives,” said Neil Shen, founding and managing partner, Sequoia Capital China. “The Bota Bio team has developed a leading integrated platform to bring innovative and efficient solutions to market for their partners. We are confident that Bota will keep enhancing their ability to accelerate the development of bio-based products, creating more value for consumers, while contributing to sustainability on a global scale.”
Bota Bio previously announced a strategic investment led by BASF Venture Capital (BVC), the corporate venture arm of BASF Group, one of the world’s leading chemical companies.
In December 2020, the company was named one of the 50 “Smartest Companies in China” by the MIT Technology Review.
