A spinout of Ginkgo Bioworks that launched in 2020 has extended its Series A round once again, bringing its total funding to $90 million.
Today, Boston-based Allonnia announced $30 million in new capital led by Bison Ventures. Other participating investors include BHP Ventures, General Atlantic and Vale Ventures.
The Boston company launched three years ago with $40 million and brought in an additional $20 million investment in 2021.
Allonnia is based in an office and lab space in the Seaport. The company has 29 full-time employees and plans to hire around 12 more team members by the end of the year.
Journey of a Ginkgo spinoff
Ginkgo’s vision is to make biology easier to engineer through its set of platforms, which are application-agnostic, said Allonnia chief executive Nicole Richards. She said Allonnia was the result of inquiries Ginkgo was receiving about applications in sustainability.
Richards said Allonnia is taking Ginkgo’s work in synthetic biology and applying it to environmental challenges. The company says it's working on biological solutions to waste management in areas like metals and mining, plastics and PFAS contaminants.
Richards described synthetic biology as a “booster” to help nature heal itself.
“If you give nature enough time, it will degrade any contaminant or material. But nature takes time. That could take hundreds of years, it could take thousands of years. But it has an affinity to do the work that needs to be done to heal the planet,” Richards said. “But it needs help. It needs a booster. And that’s really what these biological engineering tools give nature.”
Richards’ background is in chemical engineering. She moved to Boston to launch Allonnia after working at companies like DuPont and Solvay.
Allonnia’s commercializations to-date
Richards thinks of Allonnia’s work in “transformational biology” as a continuum. On the easiest side of the scale, she said Allonnia could take a natural organism that has a property the company needs, put it at the site of a contamination and give it the nutrients it needs to survive.
In Allonnia’s case, the company uses a natural organism that degrades 1,4-dioxane, a cancer-causing chemical, in contaminated groundwater into H2O and CO2.
“That’s kind of the simplest form of transforming biology, all the way to, you can evolve biology — which is what we’re doing — where you continuously feed it the contaminant, as an example, so that it’s evolving itself,” Richards said. “Then there’s the engineering tools … you may be taking an organism and giving it enhanced features that it doesn’t have so that it can provide some functionality.”
The company has also commercialized a solution for separating and concentrating PFAS out of water, Richards said.
Challenging funding environment
Richards said that compared to two years ago, the funding environment was “very different” this time around. As venture capital funding decreases nationwide, Richards said there was a lot more due diligence from investors. Some investors even put their funding on hold to see how the economic outlook evolved.
Despite that, Richards said they were able to oversubscribe their targeted $25 million raise. Richards said they anticipate this to be their last fundraise before becoming cash-flow positive.
Since launching, Richards said Allonnia has been aiming to prove that some of these tough environmental challenges, like cleaning up PFAS, can be tackled in the lab. She said the company is working on 10 different projects and has found that proof across a number of their projects. Now, the focus is on commercialization.
“Really what this fundraise is doing is adding capabilities into our lab on the pilot-scale side for the deployment, adding resources to accelerate the development,” Richards said.
