Funding profile · Computational biology

20n

A YC Winter 2015 synthetic biology company that raised a small equity round, won $1,311,479 of DARPA contracts, filed three patents, and never filed a Form D. The federal record is the only audited number in the story.

Data as of September 22, 2026. Company-reported figures are labeled.

Rounds at a glance

What the record shows

Reading the record

1. Non-dilutive money was the larger half of the balance sheet.Take the founder figure of $2.2M in equity and add the $1,311,479 of DARPA obligations, and the total capital comes to about $3.5M, of which 37 percent came from the Department of Defense. Against the CB Insights figure of $120K the federal share is 92 percent.
2. The two published capital figures differ by a factor of eighteen.CB Insights records $120K total raised and names Y Combinator and Great Oaks Venture Capital. The founder’s own timeline records $2.2M led by Khosla Ventures. The company’s archived site names Khosla Ventures and Blumberg Capital as investors and its jobs page called 20n “a DARPA, Y Combinator, and Khosla Ventures backed software biotech company”. The vendor figure looks like the accelerator cheque alone.
3. The press number in March 2015 implies a commercial customer worth about $1M.TechCrunch wrote that “20^n now has over $1.7 million in contracts from DARPA and a massive cosmetics company, and is eyeing a wide array of chemicals for production.” At that date the federal record shows one DARPA contract of $699,453. Subtracting leaves roughly $1.0M attributed to the unnamed commercial customer, which no public record confirms.
4. No Form D means the round cannot be sized independently.Companies that raise under Section 4(a)(2) file nothing, so the absence proves no negative. It does mean there is no investor count, no first sale date and no offering amount to check the $2.2M against, and no related persons list to show who sat on the board.
5. The intellectual property left the company before the company left the internet.Three US applications were assigned into 20N LABS, INC. on signing dates from February 3 to February 22, 2017. On October 28, 2017, all three were assigned out again, to Saurabh Srivastava as an individual, under reel and frame 044005/0060. All three later went abandoned. That sequence is what an orderly wind down looks like on the USPTO record.
6. The clock stopped in 2017, not 2025.The code repository has not been touched since March 27, 2017 and the last patent action is October 2017, but the domain stayed up until its final archived capture in June 2025. Registration lapse is a lagging indicator; the operating record ends eight years earlier.

Commercial signals

What to watch

• Nothing further is expected from this issuer. No Form D has ever been filed and no successor entity carries the name.
• The three abandoned applications are permanent prior art, which constrains anyone filing on the same biosynthetic routes.
• 20n/act remains under GPL v3, so any commercial reuse inherits that licence.
• Both founders are traceable: Srivastava at NVIDIA after Essential AI and a second YC company, Anderson back on the Berkeley faculty.

The 20n story on Healthcare DiscoveryHealthcare Discovery

Related companies

• Dorian Therapeutics: Shared investor: Blumberg Capital. A Stanford spinout that built small molecule blockers of USP16, the enzyme that strips a silencing mark off histone H2A, and pointed them at the arthritic knee
• Segmed: Shared investor: Blumberg Capital. A Palo Alto company that collects medical scans from hospitals under revenue sharing deals, strips the identifiers, and sells the result to AI developers and drug
• Kip Health: Shared investor: Great Oaks Venture Capital. A San Francisco startup that paired in person therapy with a data tracking app, built by two women who met climbing a telescope in Puerto Rico
• Ansa Biotechnologies: Also in Industrial Bio. An enzymatic DNA synthesis company in Emeryville that sells the genes other vendors decline

Sources

1. Public recordFederal contract HR001114C0076, DARPA to 20N LABS, INC.USAspending.gov · signed May 7, 2014
2. Public recordFederal contract HR001115C0152, DARPA to 20N LABS, INC.USAspending.gov · signed Sep 9, 2015
3. Public recordUS patent applications 2017/0211103, 2017/0211104 and 2017/0211105, and assignment 044005/0060USPTO · 2017
4. Public recordEDGAR company and full text search for 20n LabsSEC · checked Sep 23, 2026
5. Public recordRepository 20n/act metadata and commit historyGitHub · checked Sep 23, 2026
6. IndependentThe top 10 startups from Y Combinator Winter 2015 Demo DayTechCrunch · Mar 25, 2015
7. Independent20n Labs company profile, funding and statusCB Insights · accessed Sep 23, 2026
8. IndependentDARPA works with six organizations on biological materialsMilitary & Aerospace Electronics · Oct 1, 2015
9. Company20n home page, investors panel and open positions page20n.com, Internet Archive · 2015 and 2016
10. FounderSaurabh Srivastava, personal site, company timeline and patent listsaurabh-srivastava.github.io · accessed Sep 23, 2026

Compiled from SEC, USPTO, DARPA and USAspending.gov public records and published reports as of September 22, 2026. No Form D notice has ever been filed for 20n Labs, Inc., so no Regulation D offering amounts exist to report. Healthcare Venture Capital Fund holds no position in 20n. This page is not an offer to sell or a recommendation to buy any security.