EMERYVILLE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Triplebar announced $20M in new funding to expand its product portfolio in food and biopharmaceuticals.
Triplebar’s Hyper-Throughput™ screening platform acts as a “microprocessor for biology,” integrating hardware, software, biology and biochemistry to miniaturize and accelerate evolution. Triplebar and its commercial partners use the platform to develop biological systems for manufacturing low-cost, low-footprint animal proteins to replace traditional animal sources, improving the performance of animal cell lines for cellular meat products, and discovering novel therapeutic biologic drug candidates for addressing major human health challenges.
“Our investors believe profoundly in our mission to reduce humanity’s footprint while greatly increasing our quality of life with better food and biopharmaceuticals,” said Triplebar CEO Maria Cho. “In addition to our investors, we would also like to thank our corporate partners – from major multinational corporations to early-stage businesses – for their belief in our vision of a world of abundance. Their support is even more critical in today’s challenging fundraising environment.”
Synthesis Capital led the round, with participation from Essential Capital, Stray Dog Capital, iSelect Fund, and existing major investor The Production Board.
“For truly disruptive adoption to take place, alternative products need to at least match animal-based proteins on taste, price, convenience, and nutrition. We believe Triplebar’s technology platform has the potential to bring entire portfolios of bioproducts to market, helping a wide range of companies, from incumbents to startups, to scale up production while reducing cost,” said Rosie Wardle, Synthesis Capital Partner and Co-Founder.
Triplebar is a foundry business of The Production Board (TPB), a venture foundry established to solve the most fundamental problems that affect our planet. TPB, the first and major investor in Triplebar, is re-engineering global production systems across food, agriculture, biomanufacturing, human health and the broader life sciences.
Scaling the vision
The investment round comes after several years of growth for Triplebar, named for the mathematics symbol of identity or equivalence; the company makes proteins that are bio-identical to those found in nature.
In early 2023, Triplebar partnered with cultivated seafood platform company Umami Bioworks to co-develop optimized cell lines suitable for large-scale production of cultivated seafood – starting with one of the most popular and critically endangered fish species: Japanese eel.
Together, Triplebar and Umami teams will work to improve the fitness and performance of cell lines to enable lower-cost, more efficient production of cultivated foods. Umami Bioworks will leverage Triplebar’s Hyper-Throughput™ screening platform for solution discovery, testing millions of potential phenotypic solutions in the time it normally takes to search mere hundreds. The partners will work together to accelerate cell line development and optimization without the need for genetic modification.
Triplebar announced a partnership in January 2023 with global ingredients giant FrieslandCampina to co-develop and scale up the production of ingredients essential to human nutrition. Together, Triplebar and FrieslandCampina will produce microbial cells via fermentation methodologies – which, at scale, can produce proteins with a much smaller land, water and energy footprint than traditional livestock.
Blockbuster board
With the new investment, Triplebar’s expanded board includes:
- Rosie Wardle, Partner and co-founder of Synthesis Capital, the largest food technology fund globally, who previously launched FAIRR, an investor network which is supported by over $70 trillion of combined institutional investor assets.
- Dr. Howard Levine, who spent 40 years in successful product companies and as founder of BioProcess Technology Consultants, Inc., the leading CMC consulting group in the biopharmaceutical industry. Levine, Triplebar’s independent director, is one of the most visible and well-known consultants in biomanufacturing – and a pioneering early employee at four of the most foundational biotech companies.
- Dave Friedberg, The Production Board CEO and Partner, who previously was founder and CEO of The Climate Corporation, the world’s leading digital agronomy software platform, used by farmers across 200+ million acres of farms worldwide.
- Maria Cho, Triplebar CEO who previously founded Phage microbiome product company Phi Therapeutics and has more than 15 years building industry-leading teams in industries including therapeutics and cosmetics.
About Triplebar (https://www.triplebar.com):
Triplebar Bio, Inc. (TBB) is solving the biggest problems threatening our food and healthcare systems by developing products to improve nutrition and disease treatment outcomes. We harness the power of evolution to allow nature to do what it does best – to design the perfect solution to biological problems. We capture this power through miniaturizing evolution in a proprietary, hyper-throughput screening platform where microfluidics and hyperspeed testing give us access to product and manufacturing design space that has never been realized. Triplebar is a multi-product, multi-vertical, product design engine. For food and nutrition we focus on bioactives, functional food proteins and cultured meat and for healthcare we focus on novel biologics against either validated targets or previously undruggable targets. Discover more about what we can do at www.triplebar.com.
