Syndicate led by leading life science investors Northpond Ventures alongside Octopus Ventures
London, UK and Woodcliff Lake, NJ, October 14, 2020 – Ori Biotech Ltd (Ori), a leading innovator in cell and gene therapy (CGT) manufacturing, today announced the successful close of a $30 million Series A financing round, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $41 million. The new funding will be used to help bring Ori’s innovative manufacturing platform to the market. The Ori platform delivers scalable solutions to flexibly address the critical clinical and commercial manufacturing needs of CGT developers.
The Series A investor syndicate was led by the experienced life sciences investment team at Northpond Ventures, a leading global science, medical, and technology-driven venture fund, alongside Octopus Ventures, a leading European venture fund. Northpond and Octopus invested alongside significant support from Ori’s existing institutional investors, Amadeus Capital Partners, Delin Ventures and Kindred Capital.
“Closing a significant Series A round, during these uncertain times, further validates Ori’s disruptive approach to fully automating cell and gene therapy manufacturing to increase throughput, improve quality and decrease costs,” said Jason C. Foster, CEO of Ori Biotech. “We are excited to work with our top tier investors and development partners to bring our platform to market as fast as possible to achieve our mission of enabling patient access to life-saving cell and gene therapies.”
“As early investors in disruptive life sciences platform technology companies, we have seen how cutting-edge technologies like Ori’s can bring significant value to the industry and lead to breakthroughs for patients,” said Michael Rubin, M.D., Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Northpond Ventures. “We believe that the Ori team has developed a truly innovative technology that can enable millions of patients to gain access to these important treatments.”
Ori’s bespoke platform was designed specifically to address the unique requirements of a new generation of personalized cell and gene therapies. By fully automating and standardizing CGT manufacturing in a closed platform, Ori offers therapeutics developers the opportunity to seamlessly scale from pre-clinical process development to commercial-scale manufacturing. Its flexible platform enables increased throughput, improved quality and decreased costs.
“This new funding will allow us to continue addressing the significant challenges of providing high throughput, high quality and cost-effective CGT manufacturing and to bring our novel platform into the clinic as quickly as possible to support the important work of our therapeutic developer partners,” added Dr. Farlan Veraitch, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Ori Biotech.
About Ori Biotech
Ori Biotech is a London and New Jersey based cell and gene therapy (CGT) manufacturing technology company. Ori has developed a proprietary, flexible manufacturing platform that closes, automates and standardizes manufacturing allowing therapeutics developers to further develop and bring their products from pre-clinical process development to commercial-scale manufacturing. The mission of the Ori platform is to fully automate CGT manufacturing to increase throughput, improve quality and decrease costs in order to enable patient access to this new generation of life-saving treatments. Ori was founded in 2015 by Dr. Farlan Veraitch and Professor Chris Mason. The company has brought together a seasoned board and executive management team with over 100 years of pharmaceutical, cell therapy and venture building experience, including CEO Jason C. Foster (Indivior), CBO Jason Jones (Miltenyi Biotec) and Tom Heathman (HCATS) alongside industry-leading expert advisors like Bruce Levine, Annalisa Jenkins and Anthony Davies.
About Northpond Ventures
Northpond Ventures is a global science, medical, and technology focused venture capital firm, with offices in Bethesda, Cambridge, and San Francisco. Northpond has in excess of $1 billion of committed capital. Our mission is to build a better tomorrow. Learn more at: npv.vc