Twist Bioscience is a synthetic DNA biotechnology startup located in San Francisco, CA.

It was founded by Emily Leproust, Bill Peck, and Bill Banyai in 2013.

Twist is the only company in its industry to use a 10,000-well silicon chip platform for oligo-synthesis with a cost-effective, high-quality production process.

Academic research institutions and commercial companies use their custom, synthetic DNA for biodetection of pathogens, functional genomics to elucidate metabolic pathways, genome engineering to produce custom materials, drugs for vaccines and antibodies, and data storage ^[3].

On October 2016, the company opened a second site that is dedicated to backend manufacturing in South San Francisco, CA.

Funding

Twist has raised a total of $166 million to-date, including Class D funding round of $61 million in January 2016 ^[4].

List of investors include: ARCH Overage Fund, ARCH Venture Partners, Asset Management Ventures (AMV), Boris Nikolic, Cormorant Asset Management, Fidelity Management and Research Company, Foresite Capital, Illumina, Joby Pritzker, Mérieux Developpement, NanoDimension, Paladin Capital Group, Silicon Valley Bank, Tao Venture Partners, WuXi Healthcare Ventures, and Yuri Milner ^[0].

Acquisitions

Twist acquired Genome Compiler, a molecular biology software development company based in Tel Aviv, Israel on April 6, 2016 ^[1].

This allowed for Twist to expand its presence outside of the U.S. and capitalize on an e-commerce platform by reaching out to customers in need of gene design.

Collaborative Projects

In late 2016, Twist Bioscience sold 100 million base pairs of synthetic DNA to Ginkgo BioWorks, which was equivalent to 10% of total DNA synthesis capacity worldwide.

The partnership is currently the largest in the world of synthetic biology.

In April 2016, Twist Bioscience secured a deal with Microsoft to store digital data in synthetic DNA ^[-1].

This partnership, which also included the University of Washington, completed the proof-of-concept project of storing 202 megabytes of data encoding the rock band OK Go's music video for "This Too Shall Pass", copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in different languages, the top 100 books from Project Gutenberg, and the Crop Trust seed database^{[-1] [-1]}.

Twist announced a partnership with Distributed Bio on October 11, 2016 ^[2].

This deal expands Twist's services to include therapeutic antibody design and a G-coupled protein receptor (GCPR) library.

In essence, the technology and software provided by Distributed Bio will now support Twist's venture into the early drug discovery stage in pharmaceuticals.

Twist's synthetic DNA can eventually be translated into proteins such as antibodies using the design tools provided by Distributed Bio.