Ferment, a venture studio creating bio-enabled product companies, announced it has launched a new $20 million studio fund to rapidly translate biology into products that solve targeted problems across sectors including energy, agriculture, materials, and health.
The new fund’s first creation and $2.5 million investment is Alchemyca, which uses enzymes, sensors, and AI to dramatically improve how organic waste is converted into renewable natural gas. Plus, it joins existing Ferment companies that have all launched revenue-generating products within their first three years and have attracted corporate partners like Vale, Suncor, Chanel, and Nutreco.
Biology has tremendous potential to make industries more efficient and sustainable and to delight consumers with better products. And to speed up widespread impact, Ferment builds companies that focus intensely on product development and commercialization so biology can better meet the pace of these demands for performance, sustainability, and economics.
Since being created in 2021, Ferment has launched seven companies that span diverse markets across nutrition, beauty, industrial waste, animal health, and energy. The CEOs of Ferment-built companies are seasoned industry veterans with an average of 20+ years of experience in their end markets, addressing the nuanced challenges that commercial leaders see but that may be overlooked by technologists. So Ferment companies are product rather than research-focused, much quicker to market, and take advantage of technical infrastructure that can be outsourced—such as cell engineering or enzyme manufacturing partners with economies of scale.
Ferment’s new studio fund made its first $2.5 million investment in building Alchemyca to optimize renewable natural gas production from organic waste. Biogas producers use anaerobic digesters to divert waste from landfills and turn it into renewable energy, but less than 20 percent of the available carbon is typically converted into biomethane.
Alchemyca’s solution integrates advanced computational tools, sensors, and biological catalysts for measurement and stimulation, thus making it easier for plant operators to improve system efficiency by up to 50 percent. This efficiency will eventually make organic waste a viable, low-cost feedstock for producing many versatile chemicals and fuels beyond renewable natural gas.
Led by renewable energy industry executive Patrick Vagner, who spearheaded biofuels commercialization at bp, Alchemyca has established technology partnerships with Ginkgo Bioworks and Novonesis (formerly Novozymes).
The Ferment partners have 50+ years of combined experience understanding how programmed biology enables products and changes industries: Jason Kakoyiannis, previously of Givaudan and Ginkgo Bioworks; Brian Brazeau, previously of Novonesis, DSM, and Cargill; and Jess Leber, previously of Joule, Ginkgo Bioworks, and The University of Chicago.
The fund’s core LP is South Korean conglomerate GS Group, a global company operating across refining and petrochemicals, energy generation, retail, and construction, which sees the growth curve of biology and the need for practical, market-ready applications to unlock impact. The result will be bio-enabled products that people and industries can use within the next three years. Ferment seeks experienced operators with industry-specific challenges to help create new companies through this studio fund.
KEY QUOTES:
“After decades of incredible advances, the biotech industry’s biggest hurdle for widespread impact outside of pharma is not the right technology—it’s knowing the right problems to go after. There are hundreds of billions of dollars of products in the market today from biotechnology, but this is just scratching the surface of what is possible and needed.”
“The Ferment Studio is here to attract operators that recognize an urgent need in their end market, and who want to connect biology to solving that need,” Kakoyiannis continued. “The next wave of bioinnovation is going to come from product visionaries and industry experts that don’t have Ph.D.’s in microbiology, but that do see the unsolved problems in the industries they know well.”
– Ferment managing partner Jason Kakoyiannis
“Waste is an unavoidable externality of our daily lives, but it can become an extremely valuable resource with the right optimization tools. Alchemyca is focusing on the biggest pain point and cost to biogas plant operators—making waste carbon a more efficient source of renewable natural gas. If we can unlock organic waste as a productive feedstock, the potential for diverse chemical building blocks is huge.”
– Alchemyca CEO Patrick Vagner
