Xbiome Completes Series B Financing of Nearly US$100 Million, Followed by Legend Capital

Shenzhen Xbiome Biotechnology Co., Ltd. (“Xbiome”), an industry-leading AI-based microbiome drug development company, announced its completion of a new round of fundraising of nearly US$100 million, which is regarded as one of the largest financing amount of the domestic microbial industry in China. Legend Capital, as an existed investor, also participated in the new round. The funds are expected to be used for the development of drug clinical trials, investigational new drug applications (IND) in the United States and China, and the R&D of candidate drug pipelines. The capital will also be used to actively promote commercial license-in and cooperation with major pharmaceutical companies, accelerate the process of internationalization, build an innovation center in the US, and upgrade Xbiome’s technology platform, as well as release the potential of pharmaceutical research system featuring “independent R&D + platform empowerment".

Yan Tan, co-founder and CEO of Xbiome, said that, “I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to our investors for their recognition and support. In the past year, Xbiome’s self-developed drugs have entered the stage of registered clinical trials, and our platform and technology have updated rapidly. As the global microecological pharmaceutical field is evolving with each passing day, we hope to tap the opportunity to grow as fast as possible and strive to enable Xbiome’s technological achievements to empower the entire industry."

Richard Li, the President of Legend Capital, expressed that, “Legend Capital attaches great importance to technological innovation in the medical and healthcare field. Legend Capital invested in Xbiome as early as 2019. Over the years, Xbiome has gradually grown into China’s leading microecological drug company, and has achieved a major milestone in Asia’s first fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) drug clinical approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this year. The team led by Mr. Tan has shown strong comprehensive abilities and boundary expansion capabilities. It has a wide-ranging layout in the fields of AI pharmacy, microbial technology, bioinformatics and synthetic biology, and has developed clinical cooperation with multiple famous hospitals. It’s our great honor to participate in Xbiome's business and we believe that Xbiome has a bright future. "

Legend Capital led the investment in Xbiome in 2019 and continued its support to subsequent financing. In recent years, Legend Capital has increased its layout in medical AI field. In addition to Xbiome, Legend Capital has also invested in StoneWise, an AI technology-driven innovative drug R&D platform, Deepwise, an AI medical imaging auxiliary diagnosis company Lunit, an AI medical pathology in the AI medical field, BioMap, a biocomputing platform, Genome Wisdom, a genetic big data company, and Ayshealth Technology, an artificial intelligence medical chronic disease management system company.

As an industry-leading AI-based microbiome drug development company established in 2017, Xbiome is dedicated to the development of microbiome therapies by using living biological drugs and microbial small molecule modulators through microbial technology and biological information technology.

In June 2021, an FMT drug of Xbiome received IND from FDA and officially entered into the clinical trial stage. According to public data from the US FDA, it is the first FMT drug approved in Asia. At present, the domestic application in China has also made important progress with a pre-IND application been submitted to China’s Center for Drug Evaluation (CDE) recently.

At present, Xbiome has five self-developed first-in-class microbiome drug lines, and has cooperated with many famous Chinese hospitals such as Beijing Cancer Hospital, Peking Union Medical College Hospital and Southern Medical University Nanfang Hospital. Many clinical drugs show remarkable curative effects.

At the same time, Xbiome is actively expanding its drug pipeline through license-in and co-development. In May 2021, Xbiome has reached a cooperative development agreement with 3SBio on the treatment of kidney disease with whole bacteria capsules. Only four years after its establishment, the drug pipeline of Xbiome has covered the main drug forms of microecological treatment, which reflects its ability for technology commercialization.

Talking about Xbiome’s next development strategy, Mr. Tan said that recently some star companies and star drugs have appeared in the global microecological pharmaceutical industry, indicating that microecological drugs have entered the mature stage of transformation. Xbiome will seize the opportunity and launch a new strategy of “AI×BT” to continuously optimize its business structure, integrate AI with BT technologies and talents. By focusing on self-developed drugs and external empowerment, the conversion efficiency of microecological drugs will be further improved. Moreover, Xbiome has deployed various self- developed and license-in pipelines to build an industry-leading incubation platform with core competitiveness.