Zymergen, one of the world’s foremost science and material innovation companies, today announced the acquisition of enEvolv, the global leader in ultra-high throughput microbial screening and engineering, accelerating Zymergen’s ability to deliver revolutionary new products to market by 20% and further advancing the pace and scale of bio-manufacturing.
“This partnership crystalizes our long-held belief that the combination of high throughput genome engineering, powerful technology and new approaches to material science will push the biological manufacturing revolution into the mainstream,” says Colin South, CEO of enEvolv. “Zymergen is the technology leader in this domain and their high standards for research, coupled with their commitment to creating novel materials from biological sources, is truly unmatched in the industry. They are the only full stack product company that has invested in material science and chemistry capabilities in addition to manufacturing-scale genetic engineering, and we are truly excited to be joining their team and taking our work to the next level, together.”
The enEvolv platform centers around biosensors, making it possible to search billions of individual engineered cells in a single day, detecting target molecules with exquisite sensitivity and specificity. These biosensors allow throughput dramatically exceeding existing industry capabilities, which are typically limited to only a few thousand searchable cells. enEvolv’s core technology is built on multiple foundational patents licensed exclusively from the Church Lab at Harvard University and has been deployed successfully in multiple commercial applications.
“Merging enEvolv’s powerful technology to search ultra-large genomic libraries with Zymergen’s proven capabilities in engineering, automation and machine learning greatly enhances our ability to discover, design and commercialize biologically-manufactured materials across a wide spectrum of industries – starting with electronics, consumer care and agriculture,” says Zymergen CEO Joshua Hoffman. “This acquisition speeds our delivery of high performance and sustainable products to customers and further cements our leadership position in the bio-manufacturing space.”
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As part of the acquisition, the entire enEvolv organization will join Zymergen, including founder and COO Jay Konieczka and CEO Colin South. Already a global organization with offices across North America and Asia, this acquisition adds a Boston-area location to the Zymergen footprint, improving collaboration with East Coast partners and greatly enhancing Zymergen’s ability to attract talent from the rich science, technology and academic communities around New England.
“As a researcher and entrepreneur myself, I am all too familiar with the roadblocks many in the community face when trying to take powerful new discoveries to market in a cost effective and scalable way,” says George Church, Professor of Genetics and Director of the Center for Computational Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and co-founder of enEvolv. “The Zymergen team has cracked the code and built a strong business that merges the best of biological and chemical research practices with lab automation and powerful machine learning capabilities to create revolutionary new materials that are both economically robust and ecologically sound. The combined talent and capacity of enEvolv and Zymergen will further accelerate the transformation in product and material manufacturing.”
Source: BioSpace
