AI technology empowers the development of synthetic biological products. "Redbio" has received over 500 million yuan in Series C financing | 36Kr Interview

Written by Hu Xiangyun

Edited by Hai Ruojing

36Kr has learned that the leading enterprise in the synthetic biology field, "RedLin Bio", has recently completed a financing of over 500 million yuan. This round of financing is jointly invested by Greenpine Capital Partners, CSC Group, Changde Xingxin, Baiyin Kejian, and Changde Deyuan. The investor backgrounds include the management entities of government or industrial funds such as Shenzhen's "20 + 8" Future Industry Fund, the Sub-Fund of the National Fund for the Transformation of Scientific and Technological Achievements, and the Changde Synthetic Biology Fund. The raised funds will be mainly used for capacity building and new product research and development.

RedLin Bio was founded in 2017 and is one of the synthetic biology enterprises that 36Kr has been tracking and reporting on for a long time. Synthetic Biology Enterprise. Liu Jian, the co-founder and CEO, once served as the group vice president in a listed polypeptide drug enterprise, engaging in polypeptide drug research and development and management for more than 20 years; the company currently has nearly 200 R & D personnel and more than 190 invention patents. Before the Series C financing, RedLin Bio has accumulated nearly 700 million yuan in financing. In the past three years, the company's revenue has nearly doubled every year.

After entering 2024, synthetic biology enterprises have also successively ushered in their "moment of fulfilling commercialization commitments". However, on the whole, under the influence of internal and external reasons, there are not many enterprises in the industry that can achieve large-scale income and continuously ensure growth; in the primary market, the number of disclosed financings has also decreased, and there are even fewer companies that have completed large-scale financings.

When the market is getting colder, how should synthetic biology enterprises plan their future development direction? Coinciding with this Series C financing, we interviewed Liu Jian to discuss the main business progress of the company in the past year or so, and hope to find a survival strategy for the industry to refer to from RedLin Bio's story.

AI Becomes the Absolute Driving Force for R & D,

Constantly Searching for Cross-Domain Applications of "Old Raw Materials"

When talking about the company's progress in R & D capabilities in 2024, Liu Jian believes that one of the most significant achievements is that in the development of many projects, "AI technology has gradually changed from an auxiliary role to an absolute driving force".

In the field of synthetic biology, RedLin Bio is one of the companies that earlier applied AI technology to product development. In recent years, the company has carried out a systematic layout around the several core elements of artificial intelligence algorithms, computing power, and data, and established the ReAI4Bio platform. At present, it has accumulated more than 50 AI models, applied for nearly 30 AI invention patents, built its own computing power center, has more than 10 supercomputing servers, 200 trillion operations per second of supercomputing power, and built its own protein database with a capacity of more than 5.2 billion and a high-quality private enzyme database of more than 300,000.

After several years of layout in the early stage, at present, the application of AI technology by RedLin Bio has covered multiple dimensions such as AI + enzyme and strain screening, AI protein design, and digital management within the team. The direct effect of this is to improve the R & D efficiency and continuously expand the application space of "old raw materials" and screen "new raw materials".

In Liu Jian's view, this is also the key to winning for synthetic biology enterprises at present. In the past two years, affected by factors such as changes in the market competition environment, the synthetic biology field has gradually shown a trend of consumer electronics, and the phenomenon of the traditional first-generation technology "lasting for five years" is difficult to sustain. This requires enterprises to not only ensure the annual iteration of their own technology to cope with market competition at a lower cost, but also insist on new product reserves to seek higher growth space, which tests "the comprehensive ability of enterprises to balance R & D intensity, R & D investment, and team size setting".

"In recent years, our R & D investment has been more than 2 - 3 times that of the leading enterprises in the industry to achieve this goal." Liu Jian said.

Thanks to this, at present, more than 20 products of RedLin Bio have entered commercialization, and more than 10 products are waiting for mass production. The product matrix has gradually expanded from oligopeptides and polypeptides to monosaccharides, oligosaccharides and other fields, widely covering the four major sectors of functional skin care, nutritional health, biomedicine, and animal protection and agriculture.

For example, in the development of new molecules in the cosmetics field, RedLin Bio has successively launched three innovative raw materials: Acetyl Carnosine, Collagen Tripeptide, and 3'-Sialyllactose Sodium Salt (3'-SL). Taking the 3'-SL that has just completed the filing recently as an example, this is a natural functional trisaccharide that widely exists in breast milk. However, when applied in the field of functional skin care, this ingredient can exert effects such as moisturizing and repairing, anti-inflammatory and soothing. However, the traditional natural extraction method has problems of high cost and low efficiency. Therefore, RedLin Bio combines biosynthetic technology with microbial fermentation and enzyme engineering to achieve large-scale production of 3'-SL while improving the purity and consistency of the product to ensure its application is safer and more efficient.

In addition, it is worth mentioning that in the biomedical field, the globally popular Semaglutide raw material and intermediate is also one of the key products that the company has been focusing on promoting in the past two years. However, unlike most domestic enterprises engaged in the development of raw materials for Semaglutide preparation products, RedLin Bio is betting on the raw materials for the oral dosage form of Semaglutide.

"The raw material demand for the production of a single-specification oral dosage form product is tens to hundreds of times that of the injection dosage form, so the raw material price is 3 - 5 times that of the injection dosage form. Therefore, our product positioning is to be large-scale and have a low enough cost to meet the daily dose requirements of consumers of the oral dosage form." It is reported that RedLin Bio's Semaglutide has completed the DMF filing with the FDA and officially achieved mass production in the first quarter of 2024.

Liu Jian revealed that in 2024, although the main income contributors for the company are still cash flow products such as Bosseine and short-term products with a market capacity of several hundred million to more than one billion yuan such as Glutathione, medium and long-term innovative varieties represented by Semaglutide raw materials have already generated a certain sales volume in the first year of listing, and are expected to lay the foundation for the revenue in the next few years.

It is also reported that in terms of capacity building, RedLin Bio's Zhuhai factory has achieved mass production in 2024, with an annual output of 200 tons of nutritional and healthy active raw materials. At the same time, the company plans to build a new hundred-ton cosmetic raw material and API intermediate production base in Changde and a thousand-ton nutritional and healthy and API base in Shaoguan.

RedLin Bio Zhuhai Production Base

Going Global, Testing the "Overall Business Management Ability" of Enterprises

In the past year, going global has been another key word in the field of synthetic biology. In the case where the downstream volume of many individual products has not yet been realized and the upstream raw materials have tended to be involuted, it is a reasonable logic to exert efforts in the overseas market and expand sales channels.

Just for RedLin Bio, except that the African market will not be officially entered until 2025, the company's "products in various sectors such as cosmetics and drugs have completed relatively in-depth layouts in other continents and regions". At present, the company has established an overseas sales team of more than 30 people; from the perspective of the proportion of total revenue, the overseas income has increased from less than 20% in 2023 to more than 30% in 2024, and is expected to exceed 40% in 2025.

Liu Jian admits that RedLin Bio's overseas sales are indeed "expanding rapidly", but on the whole, it is not an easy process for domestic synthetic biology enterprises to achieve successful going global at this stage.

The first is the product registration and declaration. "At present, RedLin Bio has only 10 people in the registration team. Because if the enterprise itself does not have the access ability to the overseas market, it can only find local agents to sell goods, and it is difficult to achieve a high-level competition. At the same time, considering the huge certification and registration fees, as well as the collaboration ability of the back-end product and production team, the complexity becomes even higher."

The second is the construction of sales channels. Liu Jian observed that many start-up companies that did not have the ability to go global in the early stage mostly relied on the distribution networks established by mature domestic enterprises globally, but such distribution networks have huge limitations, especially when the entire industry chain is limited, start-up companies may also become one of the targets to be hit. To break the situation, enterprises must "go out" by themselves and form distribution channels locally.

In this process, human input is one of the core issues. Liu Jian takes RedLin Bio as an example and says: "In order to achieve in-depth distribution, we have more than 20 salespeople in China. Correspondingly, the demand in the international market is even greater. Frankly speaking, the current 30 people are far from enough, and in the future, it may be necessary to form a hundred-person team to link the global market."

At the same time, going global does not mean simply selling goods overseas. "The actions at the market end will inevitably drive the linkage of the production end and the R & D end, such as the professional knowledge empowerment of agents, product certification and quality inspection in overseas regions, and even the management problems after the expansion of the company team. If any link cannot keep up, the previous efforts will be in vain."

In other words, for most synthetic biology enterprises that are currently in the "shrinking" stage, going global may mean another "counter-trend expansion". The root cause is not "whether they want to", but "whether they dare to": There is not much remaining capital in hand. Can the real money invested really bring in sales?

Liu Jian believes that although the internal and external environmental changes in the past two years have set more obstacles for enterprises to go global, "but going global can still be done", but enterprises need to carry out more professional planning earlier, invest with greater determination, and continuously expand new product application spaces for continuous output and coverage.