- Ori Biotech recently announced it raised over $100 million in Series B funding. These are the details.
Ori Biotech Ltd. — a leader in cell and gene therapy (CGT) manufacturing technology — recently announced it has secured over $100 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round. This funding round was led by Novalis LifeSciences with Puhua Capital and Chimera Abu Dhabi coming in as new investors. Plus existing investors from Ori’s $30 million Series A round in 2020, including Amadeus Capital Partners, Delin Ventures, Northpond Ventures, and Octopus Ventures, have continued to support the company with additional funding.
Ori plans to use the funds to further expand key personnel across all functions, in order to rapidly transition through pre-commercialization to the launch of its innovative CGT manufacturing platform. And the company is also launching its Lightspeed Early Access Program (LEAP), allowing select partners to gain pre-launch access to the Ori platform in 2022.
The Ori platform is a proprietary, full-stack manufacturing system that closes, automates, digitizes, and standardizes CGT manufacturing. And it will enable therapy developers, contract manufacturers, and academic researchers to seamlessly transition from pre-clinical process discovery through clinical trials to commercial scale. The promise of the novel Ori platform is to fully automate CGT manufacturing to increase throughput and reproducibility while improving quality and decreasing costs through the combination of proprietary hardware, software, data, and analytical tools.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our mission as a company is to enable widespread patient access to life saving cell and gene therapies. One of the biggest obstacles to achieving this is cell and gene therapy manufacturing processes that are too expensive, too highly variable and too low throughput. Our team is focused on the urgent need to enhance the ability of cell and gene therapy developers, CDMOs and Academic Medical Centers to deliver these therapies to as many patients as possible as quickly as possible.”
— Jason C. Foster, CEO, Ori Biotech
“The significant experience and capital that our investors bring to Ori will help the company rapidly transition through the launch of our early access partnerships in 2022 to full commercialization in 2023 in order to support new and existing partners in all phases of development.”
— Barry Clare, Chairman of the Board
“We view Ori Biotech as the best-in-class solution to solve many of the significant challenges now facing CGT researchers and developers. We think Ori is well positioned, and are pleased to partner with their industry leading management team.”
— Paul Meister, partner at Novalis LifeSciences, who will be joining the Ori Board of Directors
“Ori Biotech is the first investment out of our new fund, Novalis LifeSciences Investments II. Ori’s digital manufacturing platform will play a critical role in improving patient access to cell therapies, and opens new doors to commercial success for therapy developers.”
— Marijn E. Dekkers, chairman of Novalis
“We look forward to working with Paul, Marijn and the team at Novalis LifeSciences whose vast experience in bio-enterprise scale-up will be invaluable as we enter the next phase of growth at Ori.”
— Founder and Chief Scientific Officer Farlan Veraitch
