Kriya Therapeutics secures $270 million funding; to push for growth acceleration
Kriya Therapeutics has announced that it has secured $270 million in a Series C financing round, led by Patient Square Capital. The latest funding brings the total capital raised by US-based biotech company to about $450 million.
The existing investors who participated included Bluebird Ventures, CAM Capital, Dexcel Pharma, Foresite Capital, JDRF T1D Fund, Lightswitch Capital, Narya Capital, QVT and Transhuman Capital.
The funding will be used to support the advancement of its diverse pipeline and continued scaling of its engineering, manufacturing, and computational platforms, as per the company's statement.
Jim Momtazee, Managing Partner of Patient Square Capital and Kriya Board Member, “Kriya has made tremendous strides over the past few years, attracting world-class talent, expanding its pipeline, and scaling the infrastructure necessary to unlock the full potential of gene therapy. We believe the company has the potential to be the clear leader in the evolving gene therapy field, consistent with Patient Square Capital’s focus to build and support category leading companies in health care.”
The biotech startup, who specialises in gene therapy, was founded in 2019 by Shankar Ramaswamy, Roger Jeffs and John Fraser Wright. For the uninitiated, it billed itself as a next-generation gene therapy company focused on designing & developing treatments for highly prevalent and severe chronic conditions, like diabetes and obesity. Additonally, the company would be expanding their team in the US as well globally. Currently they have 160 employers working tirelessly in labs and offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA.
The biotech startup will also scale its machine learning-enabled technology and cloud computing platform called SIRVE. The platform supports the integration of large datasets generated by the company’s high throughput screening, next generation sequencing, and algorithmic data mining platforms, the company said in its release.
Shankar Ramaswamy, M.D, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, said,“Kriya was founded to address the primary problems limiting the field, and I am proud of the progress we have made to date. This financing will support our continued growth as we advance our diverse pipeline into the clinic and further scale our core platforms, to achieve our ultimate vision of expanding the reach and unlocking the full potential of gene therapy as a modality.
The gene therapy is based on research led by Duke University’s Priya Kishnani, M.D., and Aravind Asokan, Ph.D., and contains five investigational programs for GSDs that have no existing FDA-approved treatments available, yet.