‘Don’t want to fuss with this stuff’: An­oth­er DNA syn­the­sis start­up reels in fund­ing

The way DNA is syn­the­sized has changed rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle dur­ing the biotech rev­o­lu­tion of the past four decades. Chem­i­cal DNA syn­the­sis has been the pre­dom­i­nant method, but it comes with lim­i­ta­tions, most no­tably er­rors or le­sions that dam­age the DNA af­ter many cy­cles and cause it to be short­er in length and less ac­cu­rate.

So, Ansa Biotech­nolo­gies wants to shake up the game with a method its founders think can skirt ex­ist­ing hur­dles and speed up the process. To do so, the Emeryville, CA start­up picked up $68 mil­lion in Se­ries A funds Mon­day to bring its DNA syn­the­sis ser­vices to mar­ket and scale up its R&D in a field dom­i­nat­ed by Twist Bio­science, a $2.5 bil­lion mar­ket cap com­pa­ny that’s part­nered with the likes of Take­da and Gink­go Bioworks.

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