SYDNEY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Inventia Life Science, a world leader in advanced 3D cell cultures for research and clinical purposes, has today announced the close of a US $25M Series B funding round, led by Blackbird Ventures. Inventia has also announced the launch of its US operations with the appointment of Dwayne Dexter as its Director of US Sales. Through this Series B round of financing, Inventia plans to market its RASTRUM™ 3D cell culture platform worldwide and grow its team from 36 to 150 employees by the end of 2024. In particular, it aims to develop a strong presence in the US, where the biomedical research and drug discovery markets are currently estimated to be worth more than US $40 billion. This Series B brings Inventia’s total funding to date to US $32 million. The round also included significant re-investment from Skip Capital.
“This new round of financing is a very significant milestone for Inventia. The funds will enable us to scale up and take full advantage of the increasing global interest in such things as new approaches to cancer research, and the development and validation of new drugs,” says Inventia’s Founder and CEO, Dr. Julio Ribeiro. “The biomedical applications for the use of the RASTRUM platform are very diverse. For example, it can be of enormous benefit to the pharma industry, by allowing new drugs to be tested in a 3D cellular environment and eliminated if necessary, long before they reach the stage of clinical trials. This can reduce by hundreds of millions of dollars the total cost of bringing a successful drug to market. Similarly, cancer researchers can now work at scale with cell models that mimic the human body almost exactly and produce research results that are more accurate and predictive than before.”
Alongside this Series B round of funding, Inventia has also appointed Dr. Dwayne Dexter as its Director of US Sales. Dwayne will be instrumental in growing the pharmaceutical and academic customer base and driving adoption of Inventia’s technology in the US and Canada. Currently, three of the leading US pharmaceutical companies are Inventia customers. Prior to joining Inventia, Dwayne served as the Director of US Operations at Mimetas, a US-based organ-on-a-chip provider.
Niki Scevak, Partner at Blackbird Ventures, commented on the news, saying, “We are thrilled to help accelerate the adoption globally of Inventia’s unique 3D cell culture platform. It’s a technology that improves cancer and other cellular research in a fundamental way, and the benefits of this will reshape many biomedical industries, in particular the pharmaceutical industry,” said Scevak. “Our financial support of Inventia reflects our firm belief that there is a broad-based and urgent need in the biomedical world for what the company has developed and that its impact is going to be truly generational.”
Kim Jackson, Founder at Skip Capital, commented, “Inventia has phenomenal founders who are building a high growth biotech company. I believe their technology will revolutionize the way that pioneering researchers in areas such as cancer discover and test new and innovative drugs.”
About Inventia Life Science
At Inventia, we’re creating some of the most powerful tools for advanced biomedical discovery today. We build printers and formulate bioinks that together allow human cells to be printed in 3 dimensional structures and help forward-thinking pioneers in the fields of cancer research, drug discovery and medicine to create human tissue for research and therapy purposes. Our RASTRUM™ platform creates 3D cell cultures which imitate real human tissue in terms of its structure and behaviour across a range of disease states. The physiological complexity of these cell cultures provides an environment in which world-class research and discovery can occur, right in the researcher’s own lab. Inventia Life Science Pty Ltd was the vision of Dr. Julio Ribeiro and founded by him with Dr. Aidan O'Mahony, Dr. Cameron Ferris and Peter Arthur in 2013 and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
