Triplebar has recently announced $20 million in new funding to expand its product portfolio in food and biopharmaceuticals. Synthesis Capital led the funding round, with participation from Essential Capital, Stray Dog Capital, iSelect Fund, and existing major investor The Production Board.
The company’s Hyper-Throughput screening platform acts as a “microprocessor for biology,” integrating hardware, software, biology, and biochemistry to miniaturize and accelerate evolution. And 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 – which improves the performance of animal cell lines for cellular meat products and discovering novel therapeutic biologic drug candidates for addressing significant human health challenges.
Triplebar is a foundry business of The Production Board (TPB), which is a venture foundry established to solve the most fundamental problems that affect our planet. TPB, the first and significant investor in Triplebar, is re-engineering global production systems across food, agriculture, biomanufacturing, human health, and the broader life sciences.
The funding round comes after several years of growth for Triplebar, named for the mathematics symbol of identity or equivalence; the company makes bio-identical proteins to those found in nature.
Earlier this year, 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.
Triplebar and Umami together 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 earlier this year with global ingredients giant FrieslandCampina to co-develop and scale up the production of ingredients essential to human nutrition. And Triplebar and FrieslandCampina will produce microbial cells via fermentation methodologies – which can produce proteins with a much smaller land, water, and energy footprint than traditional livestock at scale.
With the new funding round, 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, previously served as 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 founded Phage microbiome product company Phi Therapeutics and has more than 15 years building industry-leading teams in industries including therapeutics and cosmetics.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our investors believe profoundly in our mission to reduce humanity’s footprint while greatly increasing our quality of life with better food and biopharmaceuticals. 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.”
— Triplebar CEO Maria Cho
“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.”
— Rosie Wardle, Synthesis Capital Partner and Co-Founder
