A molecule you have never heard of, made a way the industry has never tried
Here is a thing that is true about acrylic acid: you are almost certainly touching some right now, and you have almost certainly never thought about it. It is in house paint. It is in adhesives and coatings. Most usefully, it is the superabsorbent core of a disposable diaper, the material that soaks up many times its weight in liquid so that a baby, and the baby's parents, can sleep. It is a multi-billion-dollar market. And it is made, essentially all of it, from petroleum.
Industrial Microbes - which also goes by iMicrobes, because saying "Industrial Microbes" out loud gets tiring - would like to change the second half of that sentence while leaving the first half completely alone. The company engineers microbes, which are just very small self-replicating factories, to eat renewable feedstocks and produce the exact same acrylic acid. Not a green-ish substitute that behaves a little differently. The identical molecule, so that the diaper, the paint and the supply chain around them do not have to notice.
The trick, and it is a real trick, is the input. Instead of oil, iMicrobes feeds its microbes ethanol - the same alcohol in biofuel - or methane, the potent greenhouse gas that industrial processes tend to vent into the sky. The microbes run the chemistry that a refinery would otherwise run with heat, pressure and crude, and they run it at a lower carbon footprint. Waste gas goes in. A useful material comes out. The company has 22-plus patents describing exactly how.
This is a good pitch. It is also a suspicious one, because "we make the same thing, but green" is the pitch of roughly every climate startup, and most of them run into the same wall. The wall is called price.
Waste in, drop-in chemicals out
The whole company fits on one arrow. Renewable or waste feedstock enters, programmable microbes do the chemistry, and a molecule that slots straight into existing manufacturing comes out the other side.
Simplified schematic based on the company's public description of its two production pathways (ethanol and methane).
The green premium is the whole ballgame
Most sustainability pitches quietly ask you to pay more to feel better. That works for a niche of buyers and fails for everyone else, because a paint manufacturer buying acrylic acid by the tanker does not have feelings, it has a purchasing spreadsheet. If the bio-based molecule costs more, the spreadsheet says no, and the planet gets a nice press release instead of a market.
iMicrobes has organized its entire company around this problem. Its stated mission is not just "sustainable materials" but sustainable materials that are cost-competitive - the same molecule, lower carbon, and a price a purchasing manager can accept without a moral argument. That is a much harder engineering target than "make it bio-based," and it is the target most bio-chemical companies underestimate.
The lever iMicrobes pulls is speed of biology. The company says it engineers its microbial strains roughly three times faster than baseline, which matters because each round of strain improvement is a round of cost reduction. A microbe that converts more feedstock into product, with less waste, is a microbe that makes cheaper acrylic acid. Do that enough times and the green premium shrinks toward zero.
Whether it reaches zero is, honestly, the open question of the whole enterprise. But the company has done the thing that separates a hypothesis from a business: it left the flask.
This funding enables us to accelerate our transition to commercial scale, helping reduce global dependence on fossil fuels.
The product line
100% Bio-Based Acrylic Acid
Made from renewable ethanol; used in paints, coatings, adhesives and superabsorbent polymers. Scaled to a pilot bioreactor producing 10+ kg per run.
Acrylonitrile & Carbon Fiber
Pathways to sustainable acrylonitrile and carbon-fiber precursors from renewable and waste streams - higher-value materials on the platform's roadmap.
Feedstock Fermentation Engine
Programmable, patented microbial strains that convert ethanol and methane into drop-in chemicals, with strain engineering accelerated roughly 3x.
Biopolymers & Building Blocks
Additional bio-based polymers and chemical building blocks derived from the same microbial conversion platform.
Three scientists who picked an unglamorous problem
iMicrobes was founded in 2014 by a team of career biotechnologists. They could have chased flashier molecules. They picked acrylic acid - enormous market, invisible product, deeply fossil-dependent - which tells you something about how they think.
Advisory board includes Jennifer Holmgren (CEO, LanzaTech) and Johan van Walsem (COO, Lygos) - people who have actually scaled gas fermentation and bio-chemicals before.
A $10M seed that funded evidence, not a dream
In November 2024, iMicrobes announced the first close of a seed round bringing total investment to more than $10 million, led by First Bight Ventures with participation from Universal Materials Incubator Co. (UMI). The reported latest tranche was about $1.55 million as part of that raise.
What is notable is what the money bought. This was not seed capital for a science experiment. By the time it closed, iMicrobes already had the patents and two working pathways to acrylic acid. The round was to fund scale-up - the leap from bench to pilot to commercial - which is the stage where bio-chemical companies most often die. Capital follows de-risking, and the investors were funding the de-risking, not the dream.
iMicrobes is uniquely positioned to help chemical companies bring biobased materials to market.
iMicrobes connects biotechnology potential with downstream industry needs.
Nine years to the flask's edge
A B2B business that hides in your supply chain
iMicrobes sells to businesses, not people, which is why you will never see its name on a shelf. Its customers are the three groups that sit around a chemical molecule: ethanol producers looking for a higher-value use for their output, acrylic acid producers looking to lower the carbon footprint of what they already make, and consumer brands that want to tell a credible sustainability story about the materials inside their products. The company reports four commercial partners.
The strategic word here is "drop-in." Because iMicrobes makes molecules chemically identical to the incumbents, a customer does not have to rebuild anything - no new equipment, no reformulated product, no rewritten spec. They swap the source of the molecule and keep everything else. In an industry where switching costs kill most alternatives before they start, making your revolution look boring is the point.
Ethanol Producers
A higher-value destination for renewable ethanol output.
Acrylic Acid Producers
A path to lower-carbon production of an existing product line.
Consumer Brands
Credible bio-based inputs for paint, coatings, adhesives and hygiene products.
Five things that stick
- The company answers to two names - "Industrial Microbes" and "iMicrobes" - plus the ticker-ready handle @iMicrobesInc.
- Its microbes can use methane as a raw material, a gas roughly 80x more potent than CO₂ as a warming agent.
- Acrylic acid is the unglamorous molecule behind both house paint and the superabsorbent core of a disposable diaper.
- Founded in 2014, iMicrobes spent about nine years in R&D before its seed round's first close.
- Its advisory board includes Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of gas-fermentation pioneer LanzaTech.
Who else is in the race
iMicrobes is not alone in trying to make chemicals from biology. The neighborhood includes gas-fermentation and bio-chemical companies like LanzaTech, Lygos, Genomatica, Solugen and Newlight Technologies. iMicrobes' wager is narrower and more specific: win on acrylic acid, on cost, with drop-in molecules - and let the roadmap toward acrylonitrile and carbon fiber follow from there.
Links, press & social
Video: iMicrobes has not published a public YouTube channel or product-demo video at the time of writing. Check the Press and Blog links above for the latest media.