Industrial Bio Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2024

Ginkgo Bioworks is the organism company. We design custom organisms for customers across multiple markets. We build our foundries to scale the process of organism engineering using software and hardware automation. Organism engineers at Ginkgo learn from nature to develop new organisms that replace technology with biology.

Rebellyous Foods is a food manufacturing technology and production company defined solely to catapult meat alternative production toward price parity with animal-based meat. Rebellyous implements novel food manufacturing equipment and processes in large-scale production to produce low-cost plant-based meat at high volumes. These goals are achieved through uniquely designed food products, the use of high-throughput manufacturing automation and ‘smart’ production centers, and the development and utilization of new innovative low-energy manufacturing tools. Working closely with industry partners, Rebellyous makes plant-based meat sustainable, affordable, and widely available.

Ansa Biotechnologies is developing a new way to make DNA that will be faster, cleaner, and more accurate than existing methods. Currently, DNA is manufactured via a chemical method that has remained mostly unchanged for 35 years. Our enzyme-based approach promises to dramatically accelerate innovation in biological research and biotechnology, including therapeutics, diagnostics and biomanufacturing.

Shiok Meats is a cell-based clean meat company, exclusively working on seafood. Shiok Meats is the first cell-based meat company in Singapore and SE Asia and we employ cellular agriculture to grow seafood meat in the laboratory using cells instead of animals. Shiok in Singapore English slang means fantastic and enjoyable. Our meats are animal-, health- and environment-friendly with the same taste, texture and nutrients, but no cruelty. Our mission is to bring delicious and healthy meat by harvesting from cells instead of animals.

Volta Labs is a genomics applications company that has developed a cutting-edge digital fluidics platform to maximize performance and scalability of sample preparation in genomics while providing unparalleled consistency. Volta is transforming the way biological research and analyses are performed, allowing scientists to focus on what they do best -- pushing the boundaries of biology. As a collective of scientists and builders working at the intersection of engineering and biology, we imagine a world where extracting vital information from biological samples is as simple as pressing a button. That's our vision, and we're turning it into reality. Our HQ is in Boston’s Seaport, where we develop and manufacture our technology. We believe in cross-functional collaboration and continuous learning – whether your interest is in biology, MechEng, CompEng, or simply joining a fast-growing startup striving to make the world a better place, we'd love to welcome you to our team. Check out some of our blog posts to learn more about work life at Volta.

64x Bio is building a platform that radically increases the speed and scale of mammalian cell line discovery. Using a novel high throughput discovery and screening platform and an integrated computational design loop, we are developing new ways of generating highly optimized and otherwise unattainable cell lines for the manufacturing of viral vectors, with a specific focus on those used for cell and gene therapies. Our platform technology enables pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to bring cell and gene therapies to patients more effectively, providing purpose-built genetically engineered cell lines to increase the efficiency of viral vector production and reduce the cost of manufacturing.

C16 Biosciences is decarbonizing consumer products supply chains by producing next-generation ingredients. The company's biomanufacturing platform produces better performing, more sustainable alternatives to oils and fats, and their first product is an alternative to palm oil. The company owns and operates Palmless™ alternative fats and oils.

At CellChorus, we apply artificial intelligence to evaluate thousands of microscopy videos in parallel to evaluate how immune cells move, interact and perform over time. This allows our customers to discover, develop, manufacture and deliver cell therapies, antibodies, vaccines and other novel therapies faster, at lower expense, and with higher rates of success. Our customers include top-25 biopharma companies and seed-stage biotechs that are developing cell therapies, antibody therapeutics and vaccines (including one of the few companies with an approved CAR T cell therapy). Hear from the team at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IE9x_tm0XnI

Founded in 2010, Lygos is providing biotechnology solutions for today’s renewable chemical challenges. They engineer microbes to convert sugars into high-value, industrial chemicals, targeting compounds where biological production is cost-advantaged over petrochemical production.

We are developing an implantable therapeutic tissue that will be surgically delivered to patients suffering from end stage renal disease. Upon implantation, this tissue will supplement the patient's renal function, eliminating their dependency on dialysis and improving their disease status. This has the potential to not only get these patients off dialysis - a significant impact for them and their families - but to greatly extend the time required before kidney transplantation is essential.

CB Therapeutics is a synthetic biology company focused on bringing cannabinoid and tryptamine therapeutics to the clinic and commercial markets to treat depression, PTSD, opioid addiction, alcoholism, pain, and other mental health problems.

We build AI models helping our customers create novel, high performing biomolecules faster. Our AI models simulate the biophysical properties of biomolecules and identify the most promising ones to be tested in the lab.

Culture Biosciences grows cells for biotech companies. Our customers genetically modify organisms to produce new therapeutics, materials, fuels and foods. We help them quickly run experiments and develop manufacturing processes so they can get their products to market faster. We've built proprietary software and automation systems to make operating our bioreactors more efficient than existing systems. We also provide customers with new software tools that help them analyze and contextualize their data. We are currently serving a number of biotech customers and scaling out our infrastructure.

Pando is an AI-driven synthetic biology company revolutionizing enzyme engineering for the pharmaceutical industry. Our ultra-high-throughput screening platform screens 1000-fold more enzymes 75% faster and 80% cheaper than traditional methods. This empowers our generative AI to efficiently optimize enzymes across multiple properties, delivering high-performing, tailored enzymes that reduce costs and enhance efficiency.

At iMicrobes, we believe there are opportunities for biology to solve our biggest problems. Our mission is to work with the world’s largest companies to use new raw materials and recycle waste for chemical production, polymers, agriculture, and space exploration.

Our mission -To ensure current and future generations have access to clean soil, water & air. -To protect and restore earth's beautiful and diverse ecosystems. -To undo the harm of industrial activity on the planet and ensure future industrial activities are more sustainable. Our research -We develop new bio-based solutions that break down and remove toxic chemicals from the environment.  We also develop bioreactor based solutions which remove toxins from industrial production pipelines, ensuring contaminants are never released into the environment. -To do this, we've partnered with Nature. Specifically, we have harnessed the power of one of Nature's smallest but most powerful technologies: enzymes. Enzymes are everywhere. They break down the food in your stomach, remove dirt from your clothes, and make our beer. At BluumBio, we look for enzymes found in bacteria, algae, plants and other living organisms that naturally degrade toxic chemicals. We then make these enzymes work better in the lab and come up with develop new applications for these technologies.

DNA has emerged as a compelling data storage medium due to its density, longevity, and eternal relevance compared to current memory technologies. However, the high price of synthesizing DNA remains a major bottleneck for adoption of this promising storage solution. We are pioneering new approaches to synthesizing DNA for data storage with enzymes and custom digital codecs. We are building an interdisciplinary team to build the world's most scalable information infrastructure in DNA. We seek technical experts in enzyme engineering, chemistry, hardware engineering, and information theory. We also seek business development to identify emerging markets for early use cases of our technology.

Kingdom Supercultures designs novel microbial cultures that make it easy for food manufacturers to create exciting new foods. We've developed the world's first 0-calorie fermented sodas, beers with entirely new flavors, and novel plant-based dairy replacements.

Brown Foods is a Stanford, Rice University and IIT Delhi alumni venture building the next-generation of food products. They are creating UnReal Milk- lab based, clean milk - extremely sustainable 'real milk' but made without any cows. Unlike any other option in the USD 22 billion dairy alternatives market today, it will be exactly similar to cow’s milk in terms of nutritional profile, taste, texture and could also be processed into butter, cheese and ice creams. They envision to disrupt the USD 700 billion conventional dairy market by giving the world its 1st 'cow free' real milk option, reducing the carbon footprint of milk by over 90% while being completely cruelty-free.

We build software to manage, analyze, and optimize bioprocessing data. Our initial customers are bio-industrial companies, who produce various products in bioreactors.

Solugen is decarbonizing the chemistry of everyday life with enzymes and innovative metal catalysts. Our new to the world Bioforge platform technology can produce high value chemical goods that are biobased and carbon negative, at cost on par with current technologies. We are making sustainable chemistry accessible to all living things, to ensure a prosperous world exists for generations.

We are making coffee for caffeine sensitive people. We do this by producing the world's first caffeine replacement, paraxanthine. It's better than caffeine at waking you up and causes fewer side effects, like anxiety and jitteriness.

Synvivia applies chemical control over cell behavior. This allows us to optimize biomanufacturing of high-value biopharmaceutical products.

Reshape Biotech builds lab robots that automate the everyday tasks of microbiologists, from filling plates to analyzing images. Other companies try to sell “one lab robot that does everything”. But those robots become so complicated that they sit unused on the shelf. We build one robot for each function, which makes them easy to use.

Mytos builds machines that automate the growing of human cells for biotech and pharma companies. Our machines sit on-prem at customer sites, growing cells which they use for testing during early-stage drug development. Even though testing on cells is so critical for developing new drugs, today they're all grown totally manually, the same as 100 years ago! With our machines, for the first time our customers can hands-off manipulate and monitor batches of cells from the cloud. We've already working with some of the biggest pharma companies. Mytos has the opportunity to change the way the entire industry works - join us and help us get there!

About Us Volumetric is a recognized world leader in building living multicellular tissues, with a focus on replicating discrete functions of the human body for basic mechanistic biology, laboratory testing and screening, and drug development. Founded in 2018 by Bagrat Grigoryan and Jordan Miller as a spin-out from Rice University, the full potential of our work is to build whole human organ replacements for patients, made from their own cells. Our Technology and Approach We have invented a suite of breakthrough 3D bioprinting technologies, featured on the cover of Science, that can build human tissue with complex blood vessel networks. We are leveraging this technology in the short term to build patient-specific tissues for drug safety and efficacy testing. Patient cells are taken from a biopsy, added to our proprietary 3D printed tissues, and then drug compounds are injected through the blood vessel network to mimic actual drug delivery in humans. Our vision is that our technology will provide rigorous, reproducible, and predictive outcomes for patients, resulting in drastically improved outcomes for diseases like cancer. More broadly, we see the full potential of our mission as being able to produce functional tissue and organ replacements for diseased or damaged vital organs in the body such as the lung, liver, pancreas, kidney, and heart.

Creating the next generation of seafood with plants and biotechnology. No compromises on taste and health while winning on price and consistency. First products are raw tuna and smoked salmon.