Bluepha Secures Round-B Financing of 1.5 Billion Yuan

Leading Chinese synthetic biology firm Bluepha announced today that it has completed a B3 round of financing, bringing total round-B funds to 1.5 billion yuan ($235 million).

Bluepha’s B3 round was jointly led by Genesis Capital and China State-owned Enterprises Mixed-ownership Reform Fund (Mixed Reform Fund), followed by Zhongping Capital, Jiangsu Huanghai Financial Holding Group and Central China Blue Ocean Investment Management Company, with additional investment from existing shareholders FreesFund Capital, Country Garden Venture Capital, GL Ventures Capital and Trinity Innovation Fund.

Previously, Bluepha received B1 and B2 rounds of financing totaling nearly 700 million yuan in February and August 2021, respectively. Round-B funds will reportedly be used for the construction and operation of at-scale production facilities for biodegradable materials PHA, the development and deployment of SynBio_OS, an industrial 4.0 synthetic biology R&D platform, and the R&D and implementation of new product pipelines such as regenerative medical materials and engineering probiotics.

Bluepha was founded by Dr. Zhang Haoqian of Peking University and Dr. Li Teng of Tsinghua University in 2016. It is an enterprise engaged in molecular and material innovation based on synthetic biotechnology, and is committed to designing, developing, manufacturing and selling new bio-based molecules and materials.

On January 1, 2022, Bluepha’s first product pipeline, a super factory with an annual output of 25,000 tons of biodegradable material PHA, officially started construction in Binhai County, Yancheng City, Jiangsu Province.

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Bluepha boasts rich technical reserves and associated intellectual properties in every link of the PHA-related technology chain, such as strain R&D, biotransformation, separation and purification, material modification and more. The product performance has been verified by many Fortune 500 enterprise customers, and obtained orders and intentions from many enterprises.

In addition, Bluepha has signed strategic cooperation agreements with many partners in major countries and regions in the world to continuously expand PHA’s global market.

Dr. Zhang Haoqian, cofounder and CEO of Bluepha, believes that the product innovation chain of synthetic biology is extremely long, and that Bluepha has accumulated a large amount of process data and engineering experience in the process of PHA R&D and industrialization. The company precipitates these data and experiences through industrial 4.0 technical elements such as automation and digitalization, and reuses them in the subsequent R&D and implementation of new products, which will form a core competitiveness of Bluepha in the future.