Codon Devices Secures $20 Million in Series B Financing

Energy Resource, Dec 18, 2006

ENERGY RESOURCE-18 December 2006-Codon Devices Secures $20 Million in Series B Financing(C)2006 JeraOne - http://www.jeraone.com

Codon Devices has secured $20 million in Series B financing in a round led by Highland Capital Partners and supported by all previous investors including Alloy Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Codon Devices, based in Cambridge, Mass., is a privately held biotechnology company focused on enabling commercial applications of synthetic biology. As part of the transaction, Bob Higgins, managing general partner at Highland Capital Partners, will join Codon Devices' board of directors.John P. Danner, president and CEO of Codon Devices, said the company will use the "significant capital infusion" to further industrialize its proprietary BioFAB production platform, "aggressively expand our novel protein and metabolic engineering capabilities, and rapidly globalize our sales and marketing presence."

Codon Devices' proprietary synthesis and design technologies improve the productivity, throughput and flexibility of its industrial, pharmaceutical and academic customers using what the company calls Constructive Biology. The company's focus is on developing and delivering high-value products and design services in a variety of application areas, including engineered gene libraries, engineered cells that produce novel pharmaceuticals, improved vaccines, agricultural products, and biorefineries for the production of industrial chemicals and energy.

Codon Devices' BioFAB platform uses advanced informatics, robotics and sequencing technologies to accurately synthesize genetic codes orders of magnitude more rapidly and cost-effectively than other currently available technology. Codon Devices is currently scaling the platform to design and construct engineered genetic devices hundreds of kilobases to megabases in length.

Founded in 2004 within Flagship Ventures, Codon Devices began laboratory operations in March 2005. The company announced a Series A financing round of $13 million in June 2005 and achieved first revenues in November 2005. Investors include Alloy Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Codon Devices' scientific founders include Scientific Advisory Board Chairman George Church, Harvard Medical School; Drew Endy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Joseph Jacobson, MIT Media Lab; and Jay Keasling, University of California, Berkeley.

For more information, visit www.hcp.com.

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