eureKARE (“the Company”), an innovative investment company for disruptive synthetic biology applications, today announces that it has co-led a EUR 5 million seed funding round in Biomemory which is advancing cutting-edge DNA data synthesis and storage solutions.
The round was led by eureKARE and the French Tech Seed Fund, managed by Bpifrance, with the support of Paris Business Angels, Prunay Impact and existing investors.
Biomemory, founded in 2021, is positioned at the crossroads of Biotechnology and IT and is a key player in the DNA data storage space. Its ambition is to help meet the climate challenge posed by data centers, which currently have a carbon footprint greater than civil aviation. Around 60% of the data generated today is stored on magnetic tapes. The global market for these magnetic tapes is nearly $6.5 billion annually, and it has been estimated that it will grow to over $40 billion by 2030.
Biomemory is developing a world-leading, petrol-free DNA synthesis and copy process based on synthetic biology, exploiting mechanisms refined over 4 billion years of evolution. Its technologies enable the production of long, bio-sourced, biocompatible and bio-secure DNA fragments that can be stored as inert polymers for thousands of years without any energy input.
The funds raised will be used to optimize these technologies and, in particular, reduce cost. Current DNA synthesis solutions used for medical and academic research applications cost $1/kilobyte. Biomemory, through its innovative solutions, currently has the potential to reduce this cost to $1/megabyte. Through further optimization and scaling of its technologies, Biomemory expects it can further reduce costs to $1/terabyte. This compares to the 10-year cost of $17/terabyte for magnetic tapes. To achieve this, Biomemory will focus on miniaturization, automation and parallelization of an end-to-end integrated and continuous microfluidic DNA assembly device.
Alexandre Mouradian, Chairman, Founder, and Chief Executive Officer of eureKARE, commented: “With close to 30 zettabytes generated annually, it is clear that data storage is a major challenge for our generation, and the market demand for data storage solutions is growing fast. We are pleased to be investing in novel, sustainable and low-cost DNA data storage approaches that aim to fill this gap in the market by revolutionizing how we store data.”
Erfane Arwani, President and co-founder of Biomemory, said: “The significant support we have received from our investors – including deeptech specialists at Bpifrance and synthetic biology experts eureKARE – is evidence of both the importance of transitioning from conventional data storage solutions to more ecological approaches and the ability of Biomemory to tackle the challenge.”