Cambridge-based biomedical company focused on antibacterial coatings Semprus BioSciences Inc. has closed on an $18 million Series B financing roubnd, led by SR One, the corporate venture capital arm of GlaxoSmithKline, and Foundation Medical Partners.
According to Semprus officials, 5AM Ventures and Pangaea Ventures, both of whom invested in the company’s Series A financing, participated in the Series B round. Added to a $10.5 million Series A round that closed in 2008, Semprus has now brought in $28.5 million in VC funds. John Sullivan, principal at Foundation Medical Partners and Simeon George, partner at SR One, will join the Semprus board of directors.
Semprus was an MIT spinout, launched in 2007 out of the labs of Robert Langer, a Mass High Tech All-Star honoree in 2004. At the time the company was called SteriCoat Corp., and was a first-place winner of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.
In December of 2008, Semprus closed on an $8 million second tranche of its $10.5 million Series A round. At the time, David Lucchino, CEO and a founder of Semprus, said the firm’s coatings platform, now called Semprus Sustain, can battle bugs for up to 30 days — which is longer than the week or so that silver-based coatings last.
In September of this year, Semprus landed a $500,000 Phase 2b grant from the National Science Foundation to apply to the company’s Sustain Performance technology to lower occurrence of blood clots and bacterial growth on medical devices. That brings the total of non-equity R&D funding Semprus has secured to $2.5 million, from the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Boston Business Journal