SamSchatz

Walk into a probiotics conference and you will hear about bacteria. Lactobacillus this, Bifidobacterium that, billions of CFUs on the label. Sam Schatz runs a company that studies the yeast in the room instead. For nearly a decade Biohm has been sequencing not just the bacteria in the human gut but the fungi, the mycobiome, the half of the ecosystem most of the industry treats as a footnote. That contrarian instinct is the whole business.

Schatz is the CEO and co-founder of Biohm Technologies, a Cleveland-based outfit that has quietly become one of the stranger bets in gut health. The company was born as a direct-to-consumer wellness brand selling test kits and supplements. Under Schatz it became something colder and more durable: a B2B ingredients and data company sitting on a proprietary dataset that pairs the genetics of bacterial and fungal gut populations with deep metadata. The supplements were the storefront. The dataset is the asset.

He came to biology sideways, which is the point. Schatz studied political science at Columbia and took an MSc in Management at the London School of Economics, where he founded and led the Graduate Management Society. There is no PhD in microbiology on the wall. What there is instead is a decade of scaling a frontier technology before anyone agreed it would work, and a conviction that the next one rhymes with the last.

That last one was AeroFarms. In 2012 Schatz joined the vertical-farming pioneer as the first employee after the founders. He did the unglamorous work first: recruiting, building culture, writing the operational playbook for an industry that did not yet have one. He stayed nearly a decade, rising to Managing Director and Global Head of Farm Development and overseeing operations of what became the world's largest vertical farm, in Newark, New Jersey. He helped grow the team from a handful of people to hundreds. Lettuce grown indoors, under LEDs, with no soil and a fraction of the water. People called it impossible right up until they were eating it.

So when Schatz talks about the gut as an ecosystem rather than a shelf of pills, he is repeating a pattern that already paid off once. Vertical farming was a bet that you could engineer a living system in a controlled environment and out-perform the wild one. The microbiome is the same wager pointed inward. "You have to be intellectually honest about what you don't know," he says. "Then you surround yourself with experts and empower them." It is a strange thing for a CEO to lead with - an admission of ignorance - and it is the most honest sentence in his pitch.

In 2021 he joined Biohm Health as President, taking over strategy, growth, and the part most founders dread, fundraising. By December 2023 he was CEO and co-founder of the reorganized Biohm Technologies, steering the company off the crowded consumer-brand highway and onto the ingredients road. The thesis: stop competing for shelf space against a thousand probiotic bottles and instead become the science that goes inside other people's bottles. Sell the picks and shovels, not the gold.

The flagship of that strategy is Mycohsa, a data-powered probiotic blend that Biohm says is clinically shown to break down digestive biofilms - the sticky, defensive films microbes build to protect themselves - and support balanced levels of both bacteria and yeast. It is a product that only makes sense if you take fungi seriously, which is exactly why most competitors do not have one. The whole catalog is downstream of a single unfashionable opinion: the gut is a two-kingdom system, and you cannot fix half of it.

In April 2025 the bet drew outside capital. Biohm closed a $4.52 million Series B from Praesidium, a Luxembourg investor, and Sparkfood by Sonae, the venture arm of a Portuguese multinational. The money funds the part Schatz cares about most: talent and infrastructure to mine the microbiome database and build an AI platform that can identify new ingredients and design targeted formulations for different population cohorts. Alongside the raise he brought in Dr. John Deaton, a microbial and enzyme researcher with more than 17 years in the field, as VP of Science and Technology. The intellectually-honest-about-what-you-don't-know philosophy, made literal.

Schatz is careful not to oversell the science as the whole story. He talks about brands needing both a rigorous foundation and an emotional connection, the thing the spreadsheet cannot capture. He spends real energy on industry education, pushing back on probiotic myths and the one-size-fits-all reflex. "BIOHM is truly transforming the microbiome industry through a rigorous science-based strategy that doesn't accept a one size fits all approach to product development," he said on taking the President role - a sentence that doubles as the company's whole reason to exist.

Off the clock the pattern holds: he is drawn to long, hard, finishable things. He is an Adirondack 46er, having summited all 46 high peaks of New York's Adirondack range. He competes in open-water swims and triathlons. He is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School. He served on the Student Advisory Board for Columbia's Earth Institute and sits on the Emerging Leadership Council at 92NY and the board of YPO New York Polaris. He also founded Social Citizen, a curriculum project teaching children and parents to use social media responsibly - a builder's response to a problem most people only complain about.

The through-line is a person who likes systems other people find too complicated to bother with: a vertical farm, a fungal microbiome, a mountain range with a fixed list of summits, a body of open water with the far shore out of sight. None of them reward shortcuts. All of them reward someone willing to count the parts everyone else skips.