bioengineering
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Rarebird, Inc.
Rarebird is a New York and San Leandro-based specialty coffee company that replaces caffeine with paraxanthine (Px), the natural metabolite your body turns caffeine into. Founded by bioengineer Dr. Jeffrey Dietrich, Rarebird uses a patented reverse-infusion process to load 60mg of Px into single-origin Colombian decaf beans, promising alertness and focus without the jitters, anxiety, cortisol spikes, or wrecked sleep. Backed by Y Combinator, AgFunder, First Round Capital and the National Science Foundation, Rarebird is trying to make Px 'the third coffee' - a category alongside regular and decaf.
SweetBio, Inc.
SweetBio, Inc. is a Memphis-based medical device company that bioengineers manuka honey into solid, easy-to-apply wound dressings. Its flagship product, APIS, combines a collagen derivative, UMF-certified manuka honey, and hydroxyapatite into a trimmable sheet that is FDA-cleared and Medicare-covered for managing chronic and acute wounds, including diabetic foot ulcers. Founded in 2015 by sibling co-founders Kayla Rodriguez Graff and Dr. Isaac Rodriguez, the woman-led, Latinx-founded company aims to make advanced wound care accessible and affordable - taking a remedy as old as the ancient Egyptians and delivering it in a modern, standardized form.
Solarbiotech
Solarbiotech is a U.S.-based synthetic biology and biomanufacturing company that helps companies move precision-fermentation products from lab bench to commercial scale. Built around a Norton, Virginia plant with fermentation capacity from 6L to 10,000L and a modular 'BioNodes' architecture, it offers end-to-end strain-to-shelf services - upstream fermentation, downstream processing, and commercial production - for food ingredients, nutraceuticals, cosmetics, enzymes, and industrial bioproducts. After a 2024 Chapter 11 restructuring, its assets were acquired by Pictor Biotech (led by ex-Novozymes executive Peter Rosholm) and unified in January 2025 with GPC Bio and Eleszto Genetika into a vertically integrated, 100+ person SynBio platform.