# TAXA Biotechnologies

Bio-engineering for the home, starting with a glowing plant

## Elevator pitch
We enable cheaper, faster, and better genetic engineering of plants. We offer our platform both as a service to other companies and use it internally to develop our own engineered plants. We make money from platform access service fees and from royalties on the sale of the final products. Our first product is a Glowing Plant, which was the first Kickstarter for a synthetic biology application earning us over $600k in pre-orders. We are also close to shipping a Fragrant Moss.

- Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/taxa
- Entity ID: wefunder:company:9314
- Last updated: 2026-06-22T05:02:51Z
- Generated at: 2026-06-23T02:15:23Z

## Quick facts
- Over $600k in pre-orders for Glowing Plant.
- Shipped first ever kit which allows anyone to genetically engineer a plant at home.
- Shipped Fluc v1 of Glowing plant, the lowest cost GE plant ever sold commercially, demonstrating clear regulatory pathways and working technology.
- Validated demand for TAXA platform by signing 3 collaborative research agreements with partner companies (more in pipeline).
- First biotech investment by Y Combinator.

## Active fundraises
- wefunder:fundraise:5315: 4(a)(6) successful (USD)

## FAQ
1. **What is the percent carry on this investment?**
   - There is no carry. We pay 3% of funds raised to WeFunder as a fee, but you keep all returns from your shares.
2. **Can you share your existing cap table?**
   - We can't share all the details on that, but on a fully diluted basis I own 64% and the balance is split between the team and our existing investors. Those investors invested on the same financial terms as we are offering today. You can read all the disclosures we are making here: https://wefunder.com/taxa/form_c
3. **Can you change or update your investment? For instance if you do the minimum $100 today, can you change that a few days later? Also, can you explain a bit about the equity raised? April 2014:$120,000; December 2014: $323,000; and now this round is for an additional $400,000? I...**
   - Yes, you can change your investment up until a few days before we close the campaign when it will become fixed. Your equity numbers are correct, though we might go over the minimum $400k we are targeting. Here's more information on the planned use of proceeds: $400k will allow us to continue the R&D required to bring our first two products to market, the glowing plant and fragrant moss. The glowing plant requires work to improve the luminosity and implementation of a new method for doing ...
4. **I'm guessing that under Title III equity funding, you don't have to do a formal prospectus. However, I would like to see some sort of financial document that shows a balance sheet before and after funding with a special emphasis on equity and debt before and after. IE total nu...**
   - Nathanael: have you seen the Form C disclosures and the Q&A section? I think that covers a lot of the information you are asking for. The Form C is here: https://wefunder.com/taxa/form_c and the Q&A is at the bottom of the main page. Happy to answer other questions that you feel aren't addressed there.
5. **I like the concept, but what safeguards are in place to ensure that any genetic modification is not spread to wild-type plants and who would be responsible for the aftermath if it did occur?**
   - We avoid releasing plants which have genes that can provide a selective advantage, for instance we are removing herbicide markers from our plants. This means that while the modification can spread to wild-relatives evolution will work against the genes persisting in the wild.

## Team
- [deleted user] (Chief Scientific Officer)
- Jamey Kain (Molecular Biologist)
- Henrik Toft Simonsen (Collaboration Partner)
- Crowdcheck Compliance (employee)
- Antony Evans (CEO)

## Recent posts
- TAXA: Introducing Orbella the Fragrant Moss (2017-07-31T20:50:53Z)
- Tell your friends about Orbella (2017-07-25T17:20:13Z)
- 2016 Annual Report (2017-05-02T18:15:29Z)
- TAXA Q2 Investor Update (2016-08-04T20:00:51Z)
- Introducing Globiotics (2016-07-18T20:50:12Z)
- Didn’t catch our LIVE Q&A? Listen to it here. (2016-06-27T18:11:22Z)
- LIVE Q&A, THURSDAY @ 5PM (PST) (2016-06-22T00:16:45Z)
- Fragrant Moss passes final technical milestone (2016-06-01T21:29:41Z)
- TAXA checklist for Title III equity crowdfunding (2016-05-16T16:06:31Z)

## Q&A
- Q: I have a hard time to trust anything that is going on for TAXA. CEO has previously run another company, "Glowing Plants". I along with bunch of others donated as "backers" to support their glowing plant projects. We were promised with seeds of glowing plants PLUS recycled light bulb vase along with other stuff. We did not receive anything. Now, the new company is named "TAXA" but it is the same people. Could the founder let people know how the company is going to make it up for people who has previously supported their projects ? Forgot to mention, CEO mentioned that they did not have money to ship any of the promised gifts, i.e. .. book, vase, seeds, and etc.. I even mentioned that I am local to San Francisco that I can come by to pick them up. No email responses....
- Q: Why did TAXA fail?
  - A: Due to product delays we were out of cash by the time we were ready to ship the Fragrant Moss, which mean we had no time to iterate the marketing mix to get product market fit. Sales of the moss were then not sufficient to allow us to get enough scale in production to sell it profitably.
- Q: Are there any updates?
  - A: Not at the moment. Still working on clearing things up with creditors and getting the certificate of dissolution.
- Q: When will the Orbella moss be sent out to investors to see for themselves?
- Q: While I am very happy you have launched your first product, the fragrant moss, I have a major concern. I sent the product to several people to let them know they should consider it for their home or as a "gift" for someone the next time they are in the market to buy a gift and everyone one of them said they really liked the product but the price point was too high for them to consider it. I agree, it feels like a product that should be priced considerably lower to sell in volume. Can you make the unit economics work at a lower price point?
  - A: Thanks for sharing your concern. I agree with you that the current price is too high, it's because we are only growing the moss at lab scale production. I think a target price of $40-50 would be better. We are in the process of finalizing a plan for how to increase production - it will require moving to our own facility rather than a shared lab space and investing in large photo bioreactors so we can grow more moss with the same staff size. We are going to need additional capital to setup that facility, and will start looking for that once we finalize the plan.
- Q: Here's a recent update from Taxa than is found on Wefunder for any investors https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-natural-lighting-with-no-electricit/posts/1786250
  - A: Thanks for sharing Scott. We'll be sending a full investor update before the end of the month covering this and some other things (I'm waiting to file our annual report with the SEC and hoping we have good news to announce on the moss which fingers crossed will come this week).
- Q: How do I invest, who or where do I need to go to invest funds?
  - A: Our WeFunder campaign is currently closed and so not accepting new investors. If you are an accredited investor interested in investing more than $10,000 then please get in touch and we can talk.
- Q: My most recent question about how are you doing and where do I find new/updates about the company was deleted. That is concerning. What is going on?
  - A: Not sure why news updates was deleted. We just posted a science update to the glowing plant blog page, we'll be posting a more business focused investor update to Medium soon. Main thing is that things with the moss are going great, here's the science update: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-natural-lighting-with-no-electricit/posts/1783649
- Q: Please update us on the company status. I believe quarterly updates were promised?
  - A: That's right, we've actually written most of the current update but are just waiting for some experiment results on the glowing plant.
- Q: Any news? Where can I find it? How's it going?
  - A: there will be an investor update shortly.
- Q: I am a original Kickstarter backer. When will I receive my glowing rose?
  - A: We don't have a timeline on that currently, we are working to debug the issues with the first glowing plant, the rose will follow after that.
- Q: Hola, estamos interesados en vender vuestro producto en España, si pueden pónganse en contacto conmigo. Gracias. email: juanantoniobermudezfaus@gmail.com
  - A: I'm afraid I don't speak Spanish, but I think you are asking to sell our products in Spain. Unfortunately we focus on making GMO products and these have very high regulatory barriers to selling in the EU.
- Q: Very cool venture, especially the "do it yourself" capabilities regarding the at-home kit. Never worked with plants before in this capacity: not quite sure about the plasmid you've designed, but since these plants auto-luminesce, I gather it's probably luciferase based. With the agrobacteria, does this result in stable transfection of a plant of interest? Or transient? What is the typical transfection efficiency? I'm a fan of tropical gardening; it'd be neat if my plants and their progeny glowed in the dark at night!
- Q: Good day, I'm a new investor and very excited about our LONG term success! I was a little bummed however to see Stratifund predict that (to paraphrase): investors in this round aren't likely to share in the long term successes because the company is most likely going to rebuy these shares in the future, to the company's benefit... How would you respond to this? Thanks.
  - A: I haven't seen that prediction, so I'm not clear what he's talking about, would appreciate if you send me a link. We have no intention to rebuy the shares to the company's benefit. There are rebuy clauses in the share purchase agreement, and this might be what Stratifund is talking about, the sole purpose of these are to avoid strenuous reporting requirements with the SEC once we hit $25MM in assets. These reporting requirements are the same as if you go public and as you probably know they impose large costs on the company. We expect the senate to ratify the 'fix crowdfunding act' which was overwhelmingly passed by congress in a bi-partisan fashion, once this is passed we expect to transfer the Title III shareholders shares into an SPV structure that will have identical financial return characteristics to the current shares but which will not trigger the SEC reporting requirements. The repurchase clause is required for us to be able to make that transfer in the future.
- Q: By that logic every plant on Earth that isn't on a farm or in a pot is self-fertilizing. So is aquaponics, as you only provide food for the fish. Furthermore, the symbiotic relationship only covers Nitrogen, and not all of it. There's a host of macro and micronutrients that plants require. Azospirillum is exceptionally effective when it comes to converting atmospheric Nitrogen. It can account for 80% of the need for Nitrogen. Then you just need to figure out the other 20%, along with the entire rest of the required nutrients. Myriads of plants develop relationships with microbes, and other plants. If you mean that you can reduce the need for manufactured fertilizers, you are correct. Otherwise, you'really just another charlatan.
  - A: Only legumes are 'self-fertilizing'. And yes the goal of this idea is to replace the need for manufactured fertilizers by engineering plants so that they can get their own nitrogen. This is one of the big 'holy grails' for plant engineering, and there are many different ways we might get there. Note that we are not currently working on this, it's something for later when the platform is more developed.