On Tuesday, TAXA Biotechnologies, Inc. announced it had secured over $250,000 from 400 investors during its equity crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder. The biotech startup made history in May when it became one of the first companies to use Title III rules of the JOBS Act.
As previously reported, TAXA Biotechnologies, founded in 2013, consists of biologists and experts who use synthetic biology technologies to engineer new organisms, which can be nurtured at home as carbon-position alternative to existing products. The company currently provides access to a platform for protein engineering, automated DNA assembly, transient experiments and stable transformation as a service that is already being used by three partners. It was also named first biotech investment by Y Combinator.
The company recently revealed:
“We offer our platform both as a service to other companies and use it internally to develop our own engineered plants. We make money from platform access service fees and from royalties on the sale of the final products. Our first product is a Glowing Plant, which was the first Kickstarter for a synthetic biology application earning us over $600k in pre-orders. We are also close to shipping a Fragrant Moss.”
Other TAXA Biotechnologies’ achievements include:
- Has over $600,000 in pre-orders on for its Kickstarter product, Glowing Plant.
- Has shipped the first ever kit that allows customers to genetically engineer a planet from home.
- Signed three collaborative research agreements with partner companies for its platform
Explaining why he and his team decided to use the Title III rules, after originally securing funds through reward-based crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, founder and CEO of TAXA, Antony Evans stated:
“We wanted to give our earlier crowdfunding supporters the opportunity to have equity in the company, and many of those people did come back and invest via Wefunder. This is a great, new fundraising model for startups, and we would absolutely come back and do it again. Wefunder made the process relatively easy for us, and their support and promotion of our offering was outstanding.”
Wefunder co-founder and CEO, Nick Tommarello, then added:
“We were excited to see TAXA’s early Kickstarter backers also invest on Wefunder. The success of the TAXA offering demonstrates that everyday Americans also want to invest in early-stage startups solving hard technical challenges.”
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