Digital Biology & Biosecurity
Digital Biology represents the future of bioscience—where new products and pharmaceuticals are engineered, not discovered. It includes industries like genomic analysis and editing, synthetic biology, bio-based products, and regenerative medicine.
Paladin has extensive expertise supporting the growth of advanced technology platforms with the potential to improve and safeguard human health. Paladin’s digital biology investment strategy recognizes the potential that the latest approaches to biologic sciences have for healthcare, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and biosecurity as well as within agriculture, chemicals, energy, and defense.
With investments led by Managing Director Dr Paul Conley, Paladin has invested over $160 million into 17 digital biology companies—three of which have achieved unicorn status—since 2008.
Investing in Biology’s New Frontier
The bioeconomy is projected to represent a market of more than $4 trillion over the next two decades and will be key to maintaining the global competitiveness and future resilience.
Paladin launched a dedicated fund strategy focused on early-stage digital biology companies to institutionalize the firm’s long-standing success in the field.
Examples of companies we have backed since their beginnings include Twist Bioscience, which listed on NASDAQ in 2018 having developed a proprietary semiconductor-based synthetic DNA manufacturing process. 10X Genomics’ innovative technologies enable discoveries across oncology, immunology, and neuroscience. Its NASDAQ IPO completed in 2019. Inscripta is developing the world’s first benchtop platform for scalable digital genome engineering. The team’s goal is to empower scientists whose gene editing research is stifled by current technical and licensing limitations.
Portfolio Examples

Hermes Biosciences
Hermes Biosciences is a life-science tools company building a benchtop, hands-off system that automates the isolation of extracellular vesicles (EVs), enabling standardized, high-yield workflows for clinical and translational researchers.
Its platform is designed for academia, pharma, and clinical labs that need reproducible EV prep at scale, helping unlock cell-to-cell “molecular conversations” for diagnostics, biomarker discovery, and drug development.

Exponential Molecular
Exponential Molecular’s technology allows researchers to create archival copies of precious biosamples. This allows the same samples to be studied with a variety of different assays without destruction of the original, exponentially increasing the value of each sample.

Aralez Bio
Aralez Bio is a biotechnology company that uses a proprietary enzyme engineering platform to manufacture noncanonical amino acids – key building blocks for next‑generation peptide and protein therapeutics – more efficiently, cleanly, and at scale for pharmaceutical and biotech partners.
By replacing traditional, resource‑intensive chemical synthesis with biocatalysis, Aralez Bio offers a cheaper, greener, and faster route to a broad portfolio of novel amino acid analogues, expanding medicinal chemistry “chemical space” while improving the sustainability and resilience of drug discovery and manufacturing supply chains.

Constructive Bio
Constructive Bio is leveraging the world’s first fully synthetic genome with expanded genetic code to build biomolecules never before possible. They are the global leader in genetic code expansion and the use of novel building blocks of biomolecules to develop better medicines, enzymes, and biomaterials.

Igniter Europe
Igniter Europe is focused on incubating early-stage companies in connection with novel therapeutics, life science tools, software, and medical solutions with significant market potential within healthcare.
Based in Paris, France and operating across Europe, Igniter EU will empower local teams to identify scientific innovations, establish companies, drive market influence, and secure institutional funding.

Partillion Bio
Partillion Bio was spun out of Professor Dino Di Carlo’s lab at UCLA. The company has developed an award-winning, patent protected unique reagent kit that incorporates biotinylated nanovials, which are compatible with common droplet generators, enabling for the first time the ability to interrogate difficult cell types, e.g., adherent cells like many types of immune cells which will not activate their immune response in the absence of certain mechanical stimulus, that is not possible with conventional emulsions.