Company Name
LS9

Company Web Site
http://www.ls9.com/

Headquarters
San Carlos, CA

Latest News
SAN CARLOS, CA - October 9, 2007 - LS9, Inc., the Renewable Petroleum Company(TM), announces the close of its second round of funding with $15 million in new investments. Leading the financing was Lightspeed Venture Partners, with additional contributions from existing partners Flagship Ventures and Khosla Ventures. The funding will support the company's continued talent acquisition and rapid commercialization of DesignerBiofuels(TM) products.

As a principal investor, Peter Nieh, General Partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners, will also take a seat on the company's board of directors.

"LS9 is the clear market leader for renewable production of hydrocarbons. We are very impressed by their differentiated technology, strong intellectual property, and compelling economics" Mr. Nieh said. "LS9 will be a valuable addition to our clean energy portfolio, and we look forward to working with them to extend their lead with respect to these second-generation biofuels," he said.

"LS9 was the first company to focus on recombinant production of hydrocarbon biofuels," said LS9 President Robert Walsh. "Building upon two years of R&D success, this financing will allow us to continue to attract top talent, begin construction of a pilot facility, commercialize on a massive scale and bring DesignerBiofuels(TM) products to market in the next two or three years," he said.

LS9 DesignerBiofuels(TM) products are a family of fuels produced by microbes that have been specially engineered via recently developed methods of industrial synthetic biology. Starting from raw materials that are natural sources of sugar such as sugar cane and cellulosic biomass, these renewable fuels stand to fundamentally change the biofuels landscape and set the stage for widespread product adoption and petroleum displacement. LS9 hydrocarbon biofuels have higher energetic content than ethanol or butanol and have fuel properties that are essentially indistinguishable from those of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.

Funding
$20 million in Series B funding from Khosla Ventures, Flagship Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Technology
LS9, Inc., the Renewable Petroleum Company(tm), is a privately-held biotechnology company pursuing industrial applications of synthetic biology to produce proprietary biofuels. LS9's products, currently under development, are designed to closely resemble petroleum derived fuels, but be renewable, clean, domestically produced, and cost competitive. In addition to biofuels, LS9 will also develop industrial biochemicals for specialty applications.

LS9, based in San Carlos, CA. aims to use synthetic biology to skip over ethanol to directly produce gasoline. LS9 co-founder and Harvard University geneticist George Church describes synthetic biology as "treating biology the way you would treat large-scale integrated circuits. We've been dealing with one part at a time or a small number of parts. Synthetic biology is engineering of new systems using parts that we trust." Another way to think about it is that biologists want to do to biology what engineers have done to electronics and chemists have done with chemistry.