A Genopole company since its creation in 2014, Abolis, has raised €35 million from a consortium of industrials and funders. This major success for the still-young company testifies to the pertinence of its innovation, which brings effective responses to market needs. Indeed, the industrial sector is looking for new processes to enable its green transition. Thereto, Abolis proposes the biological production of molecules of interest previously attainable only through fossil resources, including raw materials, intermediates and active compounds.
The company’s disruptive innovation carefully orchestrates synthetic biology, informatics, robotics and other technologies to enable the design of microorganisms able to produce a desired compound via fermentation. One of Abolis’s major advantages is its ability to respond to the needs of a wide range of sectors: health, cosmetics, food, chemistry, and more.
“We are very happy to announce the finalization of this operation, carried out with renowned industrial partners and impactful, industry-oriented investors, stated Abolis Founder and President Cyrille Pauthenier, in the company’s press release on the fund-raising accomplishment. With this strategic financing, we will be able to pursue our strategy for international growth and to strengthen our position as a European leader in the fields of industrial biotechnology and microbiome applications“.
Continuously advancing growth
Abolis’s ten-year history has been exemplary, and with his colleague Valérie Brunel, Cyrille Pauthenier currently heads a team of 55 people.
The concept that would become Abolis, won the Technological Potential Prize in the 2013 edition of the Genopole Young Biotech Awards, and Cyrille Pauthenier created the company the following year, when he was 26 years old and a PhD student at the Institute of Systems & Synthetic Biology (iSSB), located at Genopole. Abolis set up shop at the biocluster and has expanded its offices and laboratories there as the company’s needs and successes have grown.
“It’s important for heads of businesses to find good accommodations that let them project and grow steadily and serenely while remaining focused on the core activity,” underlined Abolis General Manager Valérie Brunel in 2022.
Today, the company occupies 1,400 m² of premises and intends to double that through real estate programs underway at Genopole.
Partnerships with the groups Bel and Lesaffre, and in 2019 with L’Oréal strongly contributed to the growth of Abolis, this latter successfully navigating several technical turning points in its objectives for the production of biosourced compounds.
With this new €35 million in financing, Abolis will develop its own products and deploy its services for biomanufacturing and microbiomes.
The additional funding opens doors not only to new human resources to intensify R&D but also to a larger international presence for the company, already recognized on the global stage, as attested to by the composition of the consortium: the French leader in cosmetics L’Oréal, the German chemicals company Evonik GmbH, and the respectfully German, Singaporean, Dutch and American investment institutions DeepTech & Climate Fonds (Germany), Clay Capital (Singapore), ICOS Capital (The Netherlands) and Liberset (United States).
In addition to the funding, L’Oréal and Evonik GmbH also signed a tripartite agreement with Abolis for the development of strategic projects ranging from innovation to commercialization in the fields of health, nutrition, cosmetics and chemistry.
“This investment underlines our belief in Abolis’s potential for the development of more-sustainable solutions across diverse industries, including beauty. We are excited to pursue our partnership with Abolis’s talented team to develop the company’s growth and future successes“, commented in the press release Samantha Etienne, head of L’Oréal’s venture capital fund BOLD.
