Participated · Equity · Sep 2023

Chitose Bio Evolution is a Singapore-headquartered biotech firm. It announced a fresh inflow of capital totaling 1 billion yen (about $6.2 million) from Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC). The article characterizes the funds as an investment from SMBC. The report does not provide details on the company’s core products, pipeline, or future plans. No operating metrics, past funding rounds, or founding year were disclosed in the article. CHITOSE BIO EVOLUTION is the CHITOSE Group headquarters leading development of large-scale photosynthetic microalgae production technologies and the MATSURI project. The company produces microalgae for fuels, foods, chemical products, cosmetics, and feedstuffs while developing multifaceted applications to replace petroleum-derived inputs. CHITOSE has scaled facilities from a 0.1-hectare plant in 2018 to the 5-hectare CHITOSE Carbon Capture Central (C4) inaugurated in April 2023 and plans to expand to 2,000 hectares by 2030 and 10 million hectares by 2050. Recent fundraising will be used to expand production capacity and accelerate R&D of product applications under MATSURI. CHITOSE’s initial 100-hectare facility development and application R&D have been selected as a commissioned project by the Green Innovation Fund/NEDO. CHITOSE BIO EVOLUTION was established in October 2011 and is headquartered in Singapore; the CHITOSE Group also includes CHITOSE Laboratory Corp. in Kanagawa, Japan. In the current fiscal year the group achieved a $20M fundraising target during the first half and intends to continue investor discussions to meet further procurement plans.