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Biology is the most powerful manufacturing technology on the planet, driving a multi trillion dollar global bioeconomy and touching nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Our food, materials, and medicines are biological. We are biological. And through what feels like cosmic luck, we are all alive right now during a time when the tools to read, write, and design with biology are coming online, making it possible to apply its power to civilization’s challenges.
But this isn’t the place for an ode to engineering with biology. The fact is, biotechnology already delivers everyday products like the enzymes in your laundry detergent, catalyzes shifts in global health through medicines like mRNA vaccines and GLP-1 drugs, and sparks imagination of a world to come with products like fragrances derived from extinct flowers made by Future Society or glowing plants from Light Bio. But despite these and many other impressive achievements over the last decades, it’s hard to shake the feeling that making things with biology hasn’t quite yet lived up to its potential.
We believe that achieving this potential is key to solving some of the biggest challenges we face, but to make that possible we must rethink how we build companies, products, and technologies. After decades of incredible advances, the biotech industry’s biggest hurdle for widespread impact outside of pharma isn’t the right technology; it’s the right problems.
That’s why today Ferment is launching a new $20 million studio fund to build new businesses that rapidly translate biology into products that solve targeted problems across sectors including energy, agriculture, materials, and consumer health.
Impact doesn’t come from technologies in the lab. It comes from products that offer meaningful solutions to problems in the real world. Building these requires deep insight into the problems that people and businesses face, mixed with intuition and creativity to break into mature markets and offer a solution that people can actually use. Our singular focus as a studio is to create enduring companies that rapidly hit that magic moment when a new technology comes to life as a product in a complex market.
Designing companies that do this well across industries is hard and often means intertwining biology with other technologies in order to deliver something spectacular and reliable. But we’re doing it. Let us show you what we mean.
Take our first company created by the new studio fund: Alchemyca, which is building products that increase the efficiency of renewable natural gas production from waste. Biogas producers use microbial systems to divert waste from agriculture, or wastewater facilities, or landfills and turn it into renewable energy, But less than 20 percent of the carbon from waste is typically converted into green methane.
Enzymes improve this conversion efficiency by making more carbon available for microbes to digest, but enzymes alone are not effective solutions for biogas producers. Alchemyca provides a holistic product combining hardware sensors, advanced computational tools and AI, in addition to enzymes that can be deployed at the right time, which together enable plant operators to improve their system efficiency by up to 50%.
We build businesses like Alchemyca that get the near-term fundamentals right in order to earn the right to a long-term vision of impact. In the industrial context of biogas, integrating biology with other hardware and software technologies uplifts renewable energy production and immediately empowers sustainable waste management. But it also makes converting this waste into more valuable chemicals via biotechnology much more feasible in the long term. Imagine one day making most chemicals out of farm or municipal waste rather than petroleum—now that’s a big vision.
Getting into market quickly while also laying the groundwork for this kind of step change advance takes time, trust, and talent that can operate at the edge between a technology and its application in the real world. Ferment lives at this edge, and with the launch of our new studio fund, we are putting out a request for problems where biology can be applied in industrial and consumer sectors.
We are looking to take focused bets on tangible problems that emerge from the market wisdom of leaders with deep connections into supply chains, to move biotechnology from the lab to product. We’re calling for product developers, translators, and operators who deeply understand their markets, their customers, and the problems they face.
Our studio approach has already helped entrepreneurs launch businesses in areas including beauty and fragrance, nutrition and sustainable foods, animal health, industrial waste and energy production. What we see in common in sectors as diverse as skincare and sewage treatment is that in all of these, biological solutions can be intertwined with other technologies to generate higher performing products. For example, Allonnia is tackling PFAS remediation through a suite of biological and separation solutions being implemented at government facilities in six states, while Arcaea has become a fragrance favorite by bridging the genes of extinct plants to perfumers’ creative intuition, earning Allure’s Best of Beauty award 2024.
With our new fund, we are looking to for industry leaders who see problem areas to build the next generation of bio-empowered companies around:
We imagine a Cambrian explosion of bio-enabled products in the near future, from the consumer products that we use every day to the often invisible processes that can make our infrastructure more resilient and renewable. Our goal is to see the end of industrial biotechnology as a siloed sector, because biology will simply be part of the reality of how new products are developed and how problems are solved. We envision a future where biology is ubiquitous, not exceptional.
Come build with Ferment! We want to hear from you if you see an urgent problem in your industry that needs fixing, whether you’re coming from beauty or wastewater treatment, from the chemicals industry or from food and nutrition, from material and textiles to women’s health. Biology is a powerful technology, and as with any technology, it is how biology is embedded and deployed against meaningful problems that will make a lasting impact in the world.
We have the capacity to create everything we need to flourish – from food to medicine to new materials. As we adapt biology with compassion and care, the future is waiting to be written.
Let’s grow a new world together.
We have the capacity to create everything we need to flourish – from food to medicine to new materials. As we adapt biology with compassion and care, the future is waiting to be written.
Let’s grow a new world together.
