Slashing CO2Mean, green, biological machines.
Big Picture
99.999% of industrial biotech is done with only two microbes: yeast and E. coli. These so-called model organisms have decades of research behind them, making them easy to engineer. But for the kind of bio breakthroughs needed to solve many of today’s climate problems, yeast and E.coli are too simple, slow growing, and vulnerable to contamination, making scale-up of new bio-based molecules next to impossible. The hunt for a better biotech workhorse organism is on.
How it Works
General Biological is transforming the fastest-growing organism on the planet (still too hush-hush to name) into the go-to building block of the industrial bioeconomy. The organism’s insane growth rate means faster iteration in the lab and unheard of contamination resistance, enabling General Biological to replace expensive steel bioreactors with smaller, cheaper plastic ones – a stackable, modular form factor that flips the script on today’s biotech.
Unfair Advantage
General Biological’s reactor form factor lets them “scale out” instead of up. This means they produce a high volume of product in many smaller vessels rather than one big one, spreading out and reducing risk. It puts them on a path to replace fossil fuel-intensive commodity chemicals, and more, with cheaper bio-based drop-ins. This techno-economic triumph, coupled with a stellar team of bioengineers, stands to ignite the bioeconomy – for real this time.
20
Times faster growth
than today’s industrial organisms
ABHI GODAVARTHI CEO & CO-FOUNDER
Abhi designed proteins before designing proteins was a thing. He also wrote firewalls for mysterious financial markets.
DAVID SOZANSKI CTO & CO-FOUNDER
David built boats, autonomous aircraft, and kept (very nice) bees in his spare time. He also knows how to engineer algal genomes.