The biotech that feeds bacteria natural gas and gets protein out the other end - no farm, no fishing boat, no soil required.
Here is a business that sounds like a riddle and turns out to be a factory. Calysta takes methane - the same natural gas you might burn to heat a house, and a greenhouse gas roughly 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over 20 years - and feeds it to bacteria. The bacteria, a naturally occurring microbe called Methylococcus capsulatus, eat the gas the way you might eat lunch, multiply, and are then dried into a protein-rich powder. Calysta calls the powder FeedKind, and it goes into feed for farmed fish, pigs, poultry and, more recently, pets. No arable land is involved. No crops. No animals. Just gas, microbes, water and a fermentation tank that works a lot like a brewery.
If you want to understand why anyone would do this, you have to understand the fishmeal problem. Aquaculture - farming fish - is the fastest-growing food sector on earth, and farmed fish, awkwardly, eat other fish. A large share of the world's wild-caught catch is ground into fishmeal and fed back to farmed salmon and shrimp. This is a finite, volatile, and increasingly expensive supply, and it is exactly the sort of bottleneck that makes a commodities trader nervous and a biologist curious. Calysta's pitch is that you can sidestep the ocean entirely: brew the protein instead of catching it.
The company was founded in 2012 in Menlo Park by Alan Shaw, a chemist who became president and CEO, and Josh Silverman. The core insight was not invented from scratch. In 2014, Calysta acquired rights to a proven gas-fermentation technology that DuPont and the Norwegian energy company Statoil had developed years earlier - methanotrophs, quite literally "methane eaters," converting a cheap source of carbon into single-cell protein. Calysta's job was less to discover the chemistry than to do the genuinely hard part: get it out of the lab and onto a factory floor at a price that works.
That distinction matters, because most biotech dies in exactly that gap. It is one thing to grow bacteria in a flask; it is another to grow 20,000 tonnes of them a year and sell the output for less than the ocean charges. Calysta spent years bridging that gap - first with a pilot plant in Teesside, England, opened in 2016 with UK government support, later decommissioned once the company set its sights on commercial scale.
FeedKind is made by fermentation, much like beer or yogurt - only the microbes are fed natural gas instead of sugar. The result is a non-GMO protein you can pour into a feed mixer.
Methane and oxygen are piped into a fermentation vessel.
Methanotroph bacteria consume the gas and multiply rapidly.
The biomass is separated and dried into a protein powder.
FeedKind pellets feed fish, livestock and pets.
FeedKind's selling point is that it is decoupled from land and water. The bars below are illustrative of the pitch Calysta makes - protein produced on non-arable ground, without competing with the human food supply.
The flagship: a single-cell protein positioned as a sustainable replacement for fishmeal and fish oil in aquaculture feed.
A protein ingredient for cat and dog food, shipped into Europe and used in complete dog food and treats.
Protein for pig, poultry and early animal nutrition - broadening the platform beyond fish.
The patented process itself: methanotroph bacteria converting methane into non-GMO microbial protein.
The investor list reads like a who's who of food and energy: an agribusiness giant, an oil major and a sovereign wealth fund all bought into gas-fed protein.
Alan Shaw and Josh Silverman launch Calysta.
Rights to the DuPont/Statoil methanotroph fermentation process.
Funding plus a pilot FeedKind plant in Teesside, England.
Capital to scale FeedKind toward commercialization.
A 50/50 JV with Adisseo to commercialize FeedKind in Asia.
Funding global expansion of production.
World's first industrial-scale single-cell protein facility, 20,000 t/yr.
Shipments to Poland; a complete dog food launches with Marsapet.
The clearest sign a technology has left the lab is when a large incumbent builds a factory around it. Calysseo, the 50/50 joint venture with animal-nutrition leader Adisseo, did exactly that in Chongqing, China.
The 50/50 Calysseo joint venture producing and distributing FeedKind for Asian aquaculture - and the builder of the Chongqing plant.
Led the Series C and backed early FeedKind commercialization.
Led the 2021 round funding global production expansion.
Launched a complete dog food featuring FeedKind Pet protein.
FeedKind, a single-cell protein ingredient produced by fermenting methane with bacteria, used in aquaculture, livestock and pet feed.
Methanotrophic bacteria (Methylococcus capsulatus) consume methane in fermentation tanks; the resulting biomass is dried into a protein-rich pellet or powder. It is non-GMO.
Calysta was founded in 2012 in Menlo Park, California, by Alan Shaw (President & CEO) and Josh Silverman.
Backers include Cargill, BP Ventures, Mitsui & Co. and Temasek. Its key partner is Adisseo, with whom it runs the Calysseo joint venture.
It requires no arable land, crops or animals and has a low land and water footprint, offering an alternative to wild-caught fishmeal and soy in feed.