Ori Biotech raises over $100 million in Series B funding

Ori Biotech Ltd. (Ori) is a leader in cell and gene therapy (CGT) manufacturing technology. This week the company announced that it has secured over $100 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round.

 The investment round was led by Novalis LifeSciences, Puhua Capital and Chimera Abu Dhabi who joined in as new investors. Existing investors from Ori’s previous $30 million Series A round in 2020, including Amadeus Capital Partners, Delin Ventures, Northpond Ventures and Octopus Ventures continue to support the company with additional funding.

Ori Biotech will use these funds to further expand key personnel across all functions, in order to rapidly transition through pre-commercialization to the launch of its innovative CGT manufacturing platform. The company is also launching its Lightspeed Early Access Program (LEAP), allowing select partners to gain pre-launch access to the Ori platform in 2022.

The Ori platform is a manufacturing system that closes, automates, digitises and standardises CGT manufacturing. It will enable therapy developers, contract manufacturers and academic researchers to transition from pre-clinical process discovery through clinical trials to commercial scale. The platform claims to fully automate CGT manufacturing to increase throughput and reproducibility while improving quality and decreasing costs through hardware, software, data and analytical tools.

Jason Foster, CEO of Ori Biotech said: “Our mission as a company is to enable widespread patient access to life saving cell and gene therapies. One of the biggest obstacles to achieving this is cell and gene therapy manufacturing processes that are too expensive, too highly variable and too low throughput. Our team is focused on the urgent need to enhance the ability of cell and gene therapy developers, CDMOs and Academic Medical Centers to deliver these therapies to as many patients as possible as quickly as possible”.

Barry Clare, Chairman of the Board added: The significant experience and capital that our investors bring to Ori will help the company rapidly transition through the launch of our early access partnerships in 2022 to full commercialization in 2023 in order to support new and existing partners in all phases of development”.

About Ori Biotech

Ori Biotech is a London-and New Jersey-based manufacturing technology company pioneering flexible process discovery with seamless translation and scalable commercialization of cell and gene therapies. Ori has developed a proprietary, full stack manufacturing platform that closes, automates and standardizes CGT manufacturing allowing therapeutics developers to develop and bring their products to market at commercial scale. The promise of the innovative Ori platform is to fully automate CGT manufacturing to increase throughput, improve quality and decrease costs by combining proprietary hardware, software, data and analytics.

Ori was founded in 2015 by Dr. Farlan Veraitch (UCL) and has brought together a seasoned Board and management team with over 200 years of combined pharmaceutical, CGT and venture building experience including CEO Jason C. Foster (Indivior), CBO Jason Jones (Miltenyi), CDOO Kevin Gordon (Tmunity), CTO Stuart Milne (Cytiva), VP Tom Heathman (Minaris), VP David Smith (Minaris), VP Lee Unroe (Indivior), Chris Mason (AVROBIO), Paul Meister (ThermoFisher) and Annalisa Jenkins (Dimension Therapeutics) alongside expert advisers like Bruce Levine, Anthony Davies, and Robert Preti.

Read our interview with Jason Foster about Obi Biotech previous experience in their previous funding rounds.