The Cleveland company studying your gut as a whole - bacteria and fungi together - and selling that science to the world.
Walk into Biohm Technologies today and you will not find a vitamin company. You will find a microbiome research shop with a sequencing pipeline, a bioinformatics platform, and roughly 25 people convinced that the supplement industry has been reading only half the map. Bacteria got the centuries of attention. Fungi got a footnote. Biohm built a business on the footnote.
The company is small, deliberately so, and it now sells to other companies rather than chasing your medicine cabinet. Its flagship ingredient, Mycohsa, sits inside the kind of clinical paperwork most supplement brands wave away. Its discovery engine, Symbiont, treats microbiome product design as a data problem instead of a marketing one. The pitch is unfashionably literal: study the whole gut, then make things that work on it.
Here is the inconvenient biology. The gut is not just a bacterial neighborhood. It is a negotiated peace between bacteria and fungi, and when that peace breaks down, the two team up to build biofilm - a sticky plaque that coats the gut lining. Dr. Ghannoum’s lab found that plaques formed by bacteria and fungi together are about ten times thicker than biofilms made by bacteria alone.
That is awkward for an entire industry that sells bacteria in capsules. If you ignore the fungal half, you can pour in all the probiotics you like and still leave the plaque untouched. The microbiome market spent years optimizing for the species that were easy to study. Biohm’s founding observation was less flattering and more useful: the hard-to-study half was the part doing the damage.
The bet started in 2016 as a father-and-son venture. Dr. Mahmoud Ghannoum had spent four decades on medically important fungi as director of the Center for Medical Mycology at Case Western Reserve University - more than 600 peer-reviewed papers, tens of thousands of citations, NIH funding since 1993. He is the scientist who coined the term “mycobiome” for the body’s fungal community. His son Afif handled the part scientists usually find tedious: turning research into a company.
Owning the vocabulary turned out to matter. When you named the field, you tend to know where its gaps are. The early company - then a direct-to-consumer brand called BIOHM Health - put that knowledge into probiotics and an at-home gut test. By 2024, under CEO Sam Schatz, the team made a less romantic but sharper decision: rebrand as Biohm Technologies and sell the science wholesale, as ingredients and data, to the brands already fighting for shelf space.
Everything Biohm ships is the same conviction wearing different clothes: measure the whole microbiome, then act on it. The portfolio is small and intentional.
Skepticism is the correct posture toward any company selling gut health. So look at what is actually on the record: clinical studies, citations, regulatory sign-off, and a funding round led by investors who scrutinize food and agriculture for a living.
The 2025 round was led by names that do not normally indulge wellness hype - Luxembourg-based Praesidium, Portugal’s Sparkfood by Sonae, and Forte Ventures - investors anchored in food, agriculture and sustainability. The same year, Biohm added a VP of Science and Technology and opened lab space at Portal Innovations’ Science Square in Atlanta to scale up strain development. Then Health Canada cleared Mycohsa, a regulator’s way of saying the paperwork held.
Biohm’s stated mission is to advance understanding of the whole microbiome - bacteria and fungi together - and turn it into ingredients and tests that actually move human health. The B2B pivot was the unglamorous expression of that mission. Rather than win one customer at a time on the internet, Biohm now hands its science to the brands already on the shelf and lets them carry the fungal half into products people buy without ever hearing the word mycobiome.
It is a narrower company than the one that started in 2016, and a sharper one. The research lives where research lives best - inside a Tier One medical university - while the commercial work targets the place change actually scales: other people’s product lines.
Gut health is no longer fringe; it is a category with serious money and serious scrutiny attached. As that scrutiny grows, the bacteria-only story gets harder to sustain. Biohm spent years being early to an idea that is now arriving on schedule: you cannot honestly model the gut without the fungi in it. The Atlanta lab, the platform, the clinical record - they are bets that the next generation of microbiome products will be designed from whole-gut data rather than half of it.
Still no vitamin company. Still 25-odd people and a dataset. But the footnote they built a business on is now a funded ingredient, a cleared product, and a word the rest of the industry has finally started to use.
// data driven. fungi focused. and, increasingly, hard to ignore.