
What You Should Know:
Hexagon Bio, a biopharmaceutical company pioneering the discovery of medicines encoded in the global metagenome raises $77.3M in Series B financing and made key appointments to its leadership team. The round includes participation from existing investors, including The Column Group, Two Sigma Ventures, 8VC, and Nextech, participated in the Series B round, joined by additional new investors, including Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments).
– Hexagon’s state-of-the-art, interdisciplinary platform combines technological advances and proprietary insights across machine learning, genomics, chemistry, and synthetic biology to systematically discover new chemical compounds linked to protein targets. Current public databases contain sequenced information for only 1% of the world’s fungal genomes. Through its computational and robotic capabilities, Hexagon has built a proprietary database of microbial genomes that is 10x the size of all public databases, and is adding thousands of additional genomes per month. Simultaneously, Hexagon is leveraging its database to discover and optimize structurally diverse small molecule therapeutics.
– Hexagon plans to use proceeds from the Series B round to continue to grow its team across multiple disciplines as it expands the reach and capabilities of its platform, and advances its initial programs focused on oncology and infectious disease toward development candidate nomination.