On May 20, 2020, Octant, Inc., a synthetic biology drug discovery company designing small molecule, multi-target drug leads for multifactorial diseases, announced that it has raised $30 million in a Series A financing led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In addition to Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, SV Angel, Allen & Co, and several top-tier private investors also participated in the recent financing. Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati represented Octant in the transaction and has been an advisor to the company since its inception as a spinout from UCLA.

Octant is using the proceeds to further develop its discovery platform, which targets large numbers of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and their downstream signaling pathways to engineer drugs to treat complex diseases. Additionally, Octant is responding to the global call for collaboration by open-sourcing part of its platform under the Open COVID Pledge for use in the COVID-19 pandemic. The company has shared these technological repurposing efforts for viral detection and a new protocol called SwabSeq.

The Wilson Sonsini team that advised Octant on both corporate and patent matters related to the transaction includes Matthew Bresnahan, Rezwan Pavri, Matt Wheeler, Lester Ang, Richa Sharma, August Renshaw, and Brett Zirkle.

For more information, please see Octant’s press release.