Atomico Watson and Stone Backed the Biotech Startup FabricNano

In the $12.5 million round headed by Atomico, Watson and Stone weren’t the only big names who backed FabricNano. Former Bayer CEO Alexander Moscho, IndieBio founder Arvind Gupta, and former Yelp engineer SVP Michael Stoppelman were among the angel investors. Supported, Hoxton Ventures and Entrepreneur First were among the other VCs.

Fossil fuels are still used in a variety of industries, ranging from plastics to scent compounds. Plastic manufacturing, for instance, accounts for roughly 14% of global oil demand. Fossil fuels have been identified as the principal source of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution by climate experts. We have little prospect of advancing towards a net-zero economy without credible alternatives.

That is one of the main reasons why FabricNano has attracted the attention of investors and celebrities. To generate alternatives to fossil fuels, the company uses cell-free biomanufacturing. As a result, it can create everything from bioplastics to non-fossil-fuel compounds sustainably used in perfumes and pharmaceuticals. And they can do it at a low cost. FabricNano’s approach is based on cell-free biomanufacturing.The company has developed a revolutionary DNA-based flow reactor that eliminates living cells from the process and substitutes them with enzymes that they have created. Siraj Khaliq, the partner at Atomico, said, “FabricNano has hugely impressed us with their breakthrough technology that reduces cell-free costs down to levels needed by the $4 trillion commodity chemical production market.”

These enzymes can attach directly to DNA, which serves as a scaffold for creating the building block products. Cell-free biomanufacturing technologies were small-scale and expensive before FabricNano. The startup claims that its innovation has resulted in a “significant increase” in inefficiency. In 2018, Aarons and Ferdinando Randisi started the company after graduating from the Entrepreneur First accelerator program. FabricNano is hoping to expand its staff with the recent funding inflow.