Synthetic biology enterprise "Juwei Microbiology" has successively obtained two rounds of financing, and has received tens of millions of yuan-level orders in its first year of establishment. | 36Kr Exclusive

36Kr has learned that Juwel Microbe, an enterprise in the synthetic biology field, has successively completed two rounds of financing of tens of millions of yuan. The investors include Yunlu Kechuang, which focuses on investing in the health and beauty industry, and the chairman of the listed company Jiahe Food, etc. The raised funds will be mainly used for product research and development and marketing promotion.

Juwel Microbe officially started operations in 2024. It was jointly created by the team of Academician Chen Jian from Jiangnan University and the team of Professor Cheng Jianhua from South China University of Technology. The goal is to become the green biomanufacturing leader in the health and beauty industry. The company takes bioactive sugars as the entry point, focuses on developing "high-margin innovative products" that meet market demands, provides functional innovative raw material solutions, and the application scenarios include beauty and daily chemicals, functional foods, medical aesthetics and medicine, and other fields.

Relying on the scientific research accumulation of the founding team, Juwel Microbe, in conjunction with the national scientific research platforms of Jiangnan University and South China University of Technology, has focused on the layout of two future bioscience centers, carrying out applied research from the basic research and development of new raw materials to the transformation of formula results. And it has successfully landed two production bases in Jiangsu and Guangdong, jointly realizing the R & D and large-scale production of innovative products.

Based on the industrial logic of the same origin of cosmetics and food, Juwel Microbe has launched multiple series of product pipelines, mainly applied in the fields of beauty and daily chemicals and functional foods. The core products include ultra-low molecular weight hyaluronic acid, bifidobacterium lysate 2.0, new maltotetraose, chondroitin sulfate oligosaccharide, fucose, and electrostatic nano-multifilament spinning membrane, etc.

Taking ultra-low molecular weight hyaluronic acid as an example, the Juwel team introduced that as a super-large existing product, hyaluronic acid has a large market space, but the industry concentration is high, and leading enterprises already have brand and scale effects. The core reason for Juwel Microbe to choose to enter this field is its strong technological innovation advantage and low market education cost. As a new generation of technical routes, compared with the mainstream products on the market, the product of Juwel Microbe "has a higher yield of strain fermentation", with characteristics of lower molecular weight, uniform product, and stable structure. It can customize the molecular weight according to customer needs, and the price is lower than that of top brands. Currently, this product has received customer orders of tens of millions of yuan and is continuously growing, and the production base has also been landed, gradually achieving industrialization.

Source: Juwel Microbe

It is worth mentioning that based on the current products, Juwel Microbe first entered the beauty and daily chemical industry. In the first year of its establishment, it has successfully landed cooperation with many brand customers, with the contract order amount reaching tens of millions of yuan. It is expected that the annual income will exceed ten million yuan and achieve profitability.

In the present when the commercialization problem generally plagues synthetic biology enterprises, how does Juwel Microbe achieve this?

This may be understood from two dimensions of "cost reduction" and "income generation". The Juwel team believes that for most synthetic biology enterprises, the two points of "burning money" are nothing more than research and development and factory construction. In terms of the former, Juwel Microbe aims to achieve the transformation of the scientific research achievements of Jiangnan University and South China University of Technology in the field of synthetic biology. "In fact, many R & D works have been completed in the university. We will select the technical patents that are more conducive to the market-oriented landing from them, so the R & D investment itself will not be too much, and the transformation cycle will be accelerated."

In terms of capacity building, Juwel Microbe has laid out two core production bases in Guangdong and Jiangsu in China. In the actual construction process, the company did not choose to "struggle alone", but cooperated with the industry-leading companies, with the other party mainly investing and Juwel Microbe investing in technology. For example, the Jiangsu factory, which is mainly used to produce ultra-low molecular weight hyaluronic acid, is a joint venture with a certain leading enterprise in the industry.

"Our own funds are mainly used for R & D and the market, and the supply chain itself is still completed through strategic cooperation." It is understood that Juwel Microbe has now reached a deep cooperation intention with many listed companies to jointly build a supply chain system.

In terms of the "income generation" issue, unlike many university entrepreneurship projects, Juwel Microbe is a compound team of scientific research and business, and has a very strong commercialization awareness, customer resources, and execution ability since its establishment.

The market generally expects the ideal development of synthetic biology enterprises to be financing in the first year, building factories in the second year, achieving income in the third year, and making large-scale performance in the fourth year. But in the opinion of the Juwel team, the entrepreneurial rhythm determines life and death. Different development stages require a balance of resource investment. Building a factory often takes 2 to 3 years. Once the sales cannot keep up or the financing is stuck in the process, the operational risk of the company will be very high.

The Juwel team believes that the parallel progress of R & D and commercialization, while maintaining the cash flow and exploring large single products, can more effectively extend the life cycle of the enterprise. For synthetic biology enterprises, the ceiling of a single product is limited, and the driving force for sales growth comes from large customers, large single products, and multiple product pipelines.

Source: Juwel Microbe

Thanks to the accumulation of the founding team in the industry, Juwel Microbe has extensive customer resources in the fields of beauty and daily chemicals and health foods. There are nearly 100 well-known brand customers who have completed transactions and are negotiating business cooperation. Currently, it is also expanding overseas markets such as Southeast Asia.

"The ceiling of simply selling raw materials is not high. Most of our R & D is carried out around application innovation. After determining the demand, we provide customers with a complete functional formula solution. The company is almost doing R & D co-creation with customers every week to ensure that it can timely and deeply understand market changes and demands; at the same time, the way of co-building and jointly applying for patents with customers can also maintain the subsequent purchasing stickiness to the greatest extent."

Regarding the summary of the company's advantages, the Juwel team said: "We focus on innovative products and applications in the health and beauty industry, have a well-known academic R & D team, and also have the ability and experience of commercialization, branding, and scale. Biomanufacturing is in line with the current national development strategy of new-quality productivity. As an early-stage technology innovation company, our products are widely used in many fields such as beauty and daily chemicals, food and health products, medical aesthetics and medicine. We hope that more partners can join hands for development in the future."