Semba Biosciences Inc. of Madison has been bought by Tosoh Bioscience LLC, one of its investors and a Pennsylvania-based subsidiary of Tokyo chemical company Tosoh Corp.
In 2018, Tosoh Bioscience invested in Semba Biosciences and announced its intent to acquire the company. The acquisition is now complete, according to an Oct. 4 announcement.
Semba's sale provided a "substantial investment return for Kegonsa investors," according to an Oct. 7 statement from Ken Johnson, managing director of Kegonsa Capital Partners LLC, a Wisconsin venture capital firm that also invested in Semba Biosciences.
Kegonsa Capital Partners, one of the managers of the state's Badger Fund of Funds, invested in Semba through its Kegonsa Seed Fund and later via its growth-focused Kegonsa Coinvest Fund. Those two funds owned 40% of Semba at the time of acquisition, the statement said.
Tosoh Bioscience plans to expand the current Semba team in Madison to create a global center of excellence for continuous chromatography, according to a press release.
"For long we have admired Semba’s technology and innovation, pioneering the Simulated Moving Bed technology in the biopurification processes," Tosoh Bioscience vice president of global marketing and business development Ali Soleymannezhad said in a statement. "Since our first equity investment back in 2018, the company has successfully hit every product development milestone set by Tosoh Bioscience."
Semba Biosciences is an innovator in chromatography, which enables biomolecule and chemical purification. Tosoh Bioscience provides liquid chromatography products to laboratories and manufacturing plants in the Americas.
“By combining Semba Biosciences’ advanced Simulated Moving Bed technology with Tosoh Bioscience’s best-in-class resins, we will be able to offer unparalleled efficiency and productivity in downstream processes and significantly decrease the cost of manufacturing,” Semba Biosciences president and CEO Robert Mierendorf said in a statement.
Semba will soon launch the Octave BIO System, a benchtop multi-column chromatography (MCC) unit for bioprocess development, and ProGMP, an efficient MCC skid designed for larger-scale biological manufacturing, Soleymannezhad said.
Semba Biosciences is the fifth company in the Kegonsa Seed Fund portfolio to get acquired in an all-cash transaction, according to the Kegonsa Capital Partners press release. The other companies were Madison's Jellyfish.com, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2007; Intelligent Bio-Systems Inc., a Massachusetts company that sold to Qiagen NV in 2012; Watertown's Idle Free Systems, bought by Phillips & Temro Industries in 2014; and Chicago's Networked Insights, acquired by American Family Insurance in 2017.
