YC and Ginkgo Bioworks announce new partnership for synthetic biology startups

Re:YC and Ginkgo Bioworks announce new partnership for synth... by snowmaker on Monday September 16, 2019 @03:57PM (#20987962)

We kept the intent but changed the structure. After trying it both ways, we learned that it worked better when we didn't break bio out separately. So we're still super interested in funding bio companies (hence the Ginkgo partnership), but we don't have a different deal for them.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:YC and Ginkgo Bioworks announce new partnership for synth... by nextos on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:09PM (#20988606)

So YC Bio doesn't imply a much bigger investment for 20% equity anymore?

Most bio startups will require a significant amount of capital to bootstrap. It's cheaper now, but still an order of magnitude more than for IT.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:YC and Ginkgo Bioworks announce new partnership for synth... by nemanja-mit on Monday September 16, 2019 @05:39PM (#20988837)

Surprisingly, bio is pretty similar to software capital-wise, at least initially and the standard YC deal works well. Jared and Jorge wrote good pieces around this recently -

https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-biotech-startup-funding-wil...

https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/09/biotech-researchers-ventur...

Case in point - Asher Bio from the most recent YC batch went from zero to a working molecule & in-vivo data in ~3 months on the standard deal - https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/20/here-are-the-82-startups-t...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:YC and Ginkgo Bioworks announce new partnership for synth... by kayhi on Monday September 16, 2019 @06:41PM (#20989280)

I would see this more of a reflection of spend matching the access to capital not that bio is similar to software. The difference between moving atoms and bits is significant.

[ Parent | on HN ]