When not busy trying to resurrect the wooly mammoth, geneticist George Church spends his time launching new biotech companies at a pace nearly on par with SpaceX sending rockets into space. At last count, he had co-founded or otherwise helped kickstart about 50 different companies – many of which have gained some amount of traction. For instance, Ginkgo Bioworks (DNA) acquired one of his very first ventures, a synthetic biology startup called Gen9 that we covered at the time. In fact, we’ve written about a number of the Harvard professor’s many businesses, and even held shares in another early venture, Editas Medicine (EDIT), before exiting our position in 2022.
Another one of Church’s earliest startups was a company called ReadCoor whose intellectual property (IP) would eventually become a key technology that is currently helping fuel growth for 10X Genomics (TXG). The biotech company recently released its 2023 year-end results. Revenue climbed 20% year-over-year to more than $618 million after growth hit a wall the prior year in 2022. New product platforms are helping revive growth, though the company’s flagship platform is still flagging and gross margins are still shrinking. Let
