ApiJect, which was founded in 2015 to make safe, cheap prefilled syringes for developing countries, hauled in $111 million in a private round of investment.
Funds from the round, which was led by Royalty Pharma and Jefferies Financial, are slated for ongoing development of ApiJect's blow-fill-seal (BFS) plastic profiled injection system and other “general working capital” purposes, the company said.
ApiJect’s system was invented by Marc Koska, a social entrepreneur who worked for decades in developing countries to prevent deaths from the reuse of contaminated needles. The company touts the tech as a low-cost "compact, prefilled, single-dose 'soft' syringe—manufactured using" BFS technology.
The BFS system can be used to scale quickly in order to meet unexpected spikes in demand such as for a rapid response to population-scale health emergencies. Advancements in the ApiJect design include temperature management that allows for a wide variety of sterile injectable drugs to be used, including ultracold mRNA vaccines.
Back in November, 2020, the company snared a $590 million loan from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic to boost capacity for production of up to 3 billion devices per year. The funds went toward construction of a 1,000,000-square-foot “gigafactory” in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.