biomanufacturing
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The Copy Machine That Biology Forgot
For decades, scientists have hired bacteria to copy DNA. Elegen built a faster copy room with no cells inside - and turned a biological bottleneck into a six-day delivery business.
Lyonbiopôle works on biotech’s other problem: who opens the next door?
A promising discovery still needs partners, money and a route to patients. Lyonbiopôle has spent two decades organizing those introductions - and its new strategy puts the business end of science under the microscope.
BioMADE Is Building the Factories Biotech Startups Can’t Afford
A good microbe can make plastic, rubber or protein in a flask. Proving it can do the same inside a 25,000-liter tank is where companies run out of equipment, money and time - so BioMADE is building the missing middle.
The AI Startup Teaching Machines to Read Matter - Before the Lab Calls Back
HyperSpectral began with a three-hour COVID testing line and a failed ad-tech bet. Now it is building a software layer that promises to turn light into answers - across blood samples, bioreactors, food lines and defense supply chains.
Khona Scientific Is Turning Baker's Yeast Into a Tiny Pharmaceutical Supply Chain
Khona began with rare cannabinoids and a stubborn biological problem: long pathways leak value at every step. Now the four-person Colorado biotech is aiming its microbial assembly line at a larger prize - domestic supplies of pharmaceutical starting materials and APIs.
The $185 Million Bet That Spirulina Can Make Biologic Drugs Cheap Enough to Swallow
Lumen survived a biofuel bust and a pigment-price collapse by turning stubborn green microbes into miniature drug factories. Now its oral biologics face the test that matters: whether an elegant manufacturing trick can survive large clinical trials and the economics of medicine.
BIOMEDICAN Skipped the CBD Gold Rush and Taught Oily Yeast to Make the Scarce Stuff
The Fremont biotech says its engineered Yarrowia yeast can brew rare cannabinoids in days at 70-90% below conventional costs. The clever part is not cannabis at all - it is a reusable fermentation platform, and the hard part is proving that lab economics survive the factory floor.
Cataya Bio Is Betting the Hard Part of Biotech Isn't Discovery - It's the Factory
The Shanghai startup is building a bench-to-tank ingredient business - pairing engineered biology with its own production capacity. Its lesson for biotech founders is simple: design for the factory before the experiment becomes precious.
The Fund Betting That 60% of the Economy Will Soon Be Grown, Not Made
Jennifer Kan spent years at a Nobel laureate's bench teaching enzymes new tricks. Now her fund backs the founders trying to grow the physical economy - chocolate, copper, chemicals, even data - one engineered cell at a time.
Offbeast
Offbeast is a Baltimore food-tech company making plant-based whole-cut steaks - filet mignon, ribeye and steak bites - that mimic the muscle-fiber texture of real beef. Its proprietary Cross-Fiber Assembly platform bundles plant fibers into steak-like cuts through continuous manufacturing, avoiding the expensive equipment and biological processes rivals rely on. Founded in 2022 (as Mooji Meats) and backed by Y Combinator, the company sells to East Coast restaurants and direct to consumers.
Form Bio
Form Bio is an Austin-based computational life sciences company that builds AI-driven software to speed up the design, characterization, and manufacturing of genetic medicines, especially adeno-associated virus (AAV) cell and gene therapies. Spun out of Colossal Biosciences in 2022 with a $30M Series A, its platform lets scientists model billions of therapeutic vector designs in silico to improve efficacy, safety, and manufacturability before ever entering the lab, targeting the manufacturing bottleneck that drives the majority of FDA rejections in the field.
Manus
Manus (Manus Bio) is an MIT-born industrial biotechnology company that engineers microbial cell factories and precision fermentation to produce natural ingredients - sweeteners, flavors, fragrances and pharmaceutical building blocks - that are normally extracted from plants or made from petrochemicals. Branded as 'The BioAlternatives Company,' Manus runs an R&D hub in Boston and a commercial-scale biomanufacturing plant in Augusta, Georgia, where it makes products such as monk fruit sweetener and stevia Reb M for partners including Givaudan and Tate & Lyle.
Neion Bio
Neion Bio is a New York biotech company that genetically engineers chicken eggs into factories for complex biologic drugs. Its Raptor platform aims to make monoclonal antibodies and other glycosylated proteins at a fraction of the capital cost and carbon footprint of conventional cell-culture bioreactors. Founded in 2024 and emerged from stealth in March 2026, the company raised an oversubscribed $23 million Series A in June 2026 and signed an early multi-product biosimilar deal with a major global pharmaceutical company.
Omphalos Lifesciences Inc
Omphalos Lifesciences is a Dallas-based biotech software company building a programmable virtual cell platform. Founded by computational biologist Daehwan Kim - creator of the widely used HISAT and TopHat sequencing tools - the company created L++, a high-level programming language that lets biologists describe, simulate, and visualize living systems the way software engineers write code. Its Life Designer platform aims to accelerate drug discovery, precision medicine, and biomanufacturing by running experiments in silico before they hit the lab bench.
Ring Therapeutics
Ring Therapeutics is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotechnology company founded by Flagship Pioneering to build a new class of gene therapy delivery vectors from anelloviruses - the most abundant and diverse family of viruses that naturally and harmlessly live inside the human body. Because these commensal viruses evade the immune system, Ring's AnelloVector platform aims to solve gene therapy's biggest limitations: the inability to re-dose patients, pre-existing immunity, and narrow tissue targeting. Through its Anellogy discovery platform and AnelloBricks in-vitro manufacturing technology, Ring is engineering re-dosable, tissue-specific, scalable vectors intended to carry a wide range of therapeutic payloads.
Ansa Biotechnologies, Inc.
Ansa Biotechnologies is an Emeryville, California biotech company that makes custom synthetic DNA using a proprietary enzymatic synthesis platform. Its no-assembly approach can build long, complex, high-fidelity DNA sequences - including clonal constructs up to 50 kilobases - that stump legacy chemical methods, and it backs delivery with an industry-first On-Time Guarantee. Founded in 2018 by UC Berkeley researchers, Ansa serves scientists across pharmaceuticals, gene therapy, agriculture, and industrial biotech.
TeselaGen Biotechnology
TeselaGen Biotechnology builds an AI-powered, cloud-based operating system for biological R&D. Spun out of the Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute and founded by Stanford and Berkeley scientists, its platform - organized around the Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle with DESIGN, BUILD, TEST and DISCOVER modules - lets researchers design DNA libraries, generate lab-robot assembly protocols, capture experimental data and apply machine learning to converge on better biological products faster. Customers span industrial biotech, biopharma and academia, including Amgen, LanzaTech, Twist Bioscience, Arzeda and Stanford.
Circe
Circe (Circe Bioscience) is a Boston-based climate biotech company that engineers microbes to eat carbon dioxide and build valuable molecules - fats, oils, sugars, plastics and fuels - using only CO2, water and electricity. Spun out of Harvard's Wyss Institute in 2021, its gas-fermentation platform consumes roughly 3 kilograms of CO2 for every kilogram of oil it produces, making the process carbon-negative. The company has made the world's first chocolate using fermentation-derived cocoa butter and, in September 2024, raised a $5M seed round to open a pilot plant in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Foray Bioscience
Foray Bioscience is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech company growing plants and plant products from single cells. Founded in 2022 by MIT PhD Ashley Beckwith, Foray pairs plant cell culture with AI to make lab-grown plant material predictable across species - unlocking harvest-free wood and materials, rapidly scalable seed supplies, faster crop improvement, and even conservation and de-extinction work. Its Pando software acts like a 'Google Maps for plant growth,' helping researchers navigate the dozens of variables that govern how a plant cell grows.
Industrial Microbes (iMicrobes)
Industrial Microbes (iMicrobes) is an Alameda, California synthetic-biology company that engineers programmable microbes to turn renewable, low-carbon feedstocks - primarily ethanol and methane - into drop-in chemicals and materials such as 100% bio-based acrylic acid, acrylonitrile and carbon fiber precursors. Founded in 2014, the company aims to give chemical producers and consumer brands a cost-competitive, lower-carbon alternative to petrochemicals, and has scaled its bioprocess to a pilot bioreactor producing 10+ kg per run.
Avenue Biosciences
Avenue Biosciences is a transatlantic biotech building the first platform to measure and modulate the cellular secretory pathway at scale. Spun out of the University of Helsinki and headquartered between Helsinki and Palo Alto, the company pairs high-throughput chemistry with machine learning to design signal peptides and boost yields of therapeutic proteins - biologics, biosimilars, and mRNA-encoded medicines - so that production bottlenecks stop limiting which therapies reach patients.
Mango Materials
Mango Materials is a biomanufacturing company that converts waste methane - the same gas that vents from landfills and wastewater plants - into biodegradable polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) pellets sold under the YOPP brand. The pellets replace conventional plastics in fibers, films, rigid goods, and 3D-printing feedstock, and they fully biodegrade in soil, freshwater, and marine environments.
I Peace, Inc.
I Peace, Inc. is a Palo Alto- and Kyoto-based biotech that mass-manufactures clinical-grade induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) using a proprietary automated, closed-cassette platform. Founded in 2015 by Koji Tanabe - a co-author of the world's first human iPSC paper from Shinya Yamanaka's Nobel Prize-winning lab - the company operates as a CDMO supplying GMP-grade iPSCs to pharmaceutical companies, biotechs, and research institutions, and offers personal iPSC banking and longevity services that aim to make cell therapy affordable and accessible.
Morphocell Technologies
Morphocell Technologies is a Montreal-area regenerative medicine company building allogeneic, stem cell-derived engineered tissues to treat severe organ deficiencies, starting with the liver. Its lead program, ReLiver, is a transiently implanted engineered liver tissue made from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) intended to treat acute and acute-on-chronic liver failure without immunosuppression. Spun out of CHU Sainte-Justine in 2018, the company has raised US$50 million in Series A funding and runs vertically integrated operations spanning discovery, cell manufacturing and preclinical development.
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.
Triplebar
Triplebar is an Emeryville, California biotech company that pairs a high-throughput microfluidic screening platform with AI genomic models to run evolution at hyper-speed. By packing tens of millions of picoliter microreactors onto a palm-sized chip and testing thousands per second, it generates matched genotype-phenotype datasets that let partners optimize cell lines and microbial strains far faster and cheaper than conventional lab work. The platform powers products across food (precision fermentation, cultivated meat) and biopharma (biologics, cell-engaging cancer therapies).
Kytopen
Kytopen is a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech and MIT spinout building Flowfect, a non-viral, continuous-flow platform that uses fluid flow plus electric fields to deliver mRNA, DNA and CRISPR payloads into cells. The technology aims to engineer hundreds of billions of cells in minutes, removing a major bottleneck in discovering, developing and manufacturing advanced cell therapies like CAR-T and NK-cell treatments.
Asimov
Asimov is a Boston-based synthetic biology company building computer-aided design (CAD) tools for engineering living cells. Founded in 2017 by bioengineers from MIT and Boston University, it combines mammalian synthetic biology, software, and machine learning through its Kernel platform and 'Edge' production systems to help drug makers design and manufacture cell, gene, and RNA therapies more reliably. The company has raised over $200M, including a $175M Series B in January 2023 led by CPP Investments.
Stämm
Stämm is a deep-tech biomanufacturing company building a desktop-scale, 3D-printed, bubble-free bioprocessor that replaces the giant stainless-steel tanks of conventional pharma. Founded in Buenos Aires and headquartered in San Francisco, the company is pursuing a vision of decentralized, AI-driven production of biologics and cell therapies.
Antheia, Inc.
Antheia is a Menlo Park biotech using engineered yeast to brew the active ingredients behind essential medicines - replacing slow, weather-dependent poppy farming with industrial-scale fermentation. Founded out of Stanford's Smolke Lab, the company aims to end pharmaceutical shortages by turning sugar into complex molecules like thebaine in weeks instead of years.