Inscripta has been on the scene since 2017. The Colorado startup went through a rapid expansion as it was building out its genome engineering platform and raised nearly half a billion dollars in total funding by the end of 2021. But the growth proved unsustainable and Inscripta ended up downsizing significantly in the. With this move, they are challenging the industry’s popular brute-force approach to creating bio-based products and instead envisioning more of a “lean company” model.
“Manipulating genomes until recently has been very slow, laborious, and expensive,” says Fox, who is now the Senior VP of Synthetic Biology Products at Inscripta. “We can do it much faster than ever before.” Sestina’s expertise in developing strains that can withstand the rigors of commercial manufacturing conditions relies on incorporating high-dimensional data and predictive modeling into their strain development process, which can save months during the scale-up phase.