enzyme-engineering
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Phenotap’s $3 Million Pivot: The Ketone Wearable Became an Enzyme Business
The New York startup began with a wearable that promised hourly ketone trends. Its sharper bet is now one layer deeper: sell device makers the missing biochemical engine.
Pando Bioscience
Pando Bioscience is an AI-driven synthetic biology company that engineers better enzymes for the pharmaceutical and diagnostics industries. It pairs a generative-AI design model with an ultra-high-throughput 'one-pot' screening platform that tests roughly 1,000 times more enzyme variants - about 75% faster and 80% cheaper than conventional methods - compressing the design-build-test-learn cycle to about one month. Founded in 2022 by former Ginkgo Bioworks scientists Will Cao and Yang Wang, Pando both improves customers' enzymes and builds its own proprietary enzyme assets, such as the Saiyan-Phi29 polymerase.
Aralez Bio
Aralez Bio is a Berkeley, California biotechnology company that uses engineered enzymes and directed evolution to manufacture noncanonical amino acids (ncAAs) - the specialized building blocks used in peptide drugs and other pharmaceuticals. Spun out of Nobel Laureate Frances Arnold's Caltech lab in 2019, the company runs biocatalytic reactions that produce enantiopure ncAAs in a single step with water as the main byproduct, expanding the amino acid toolbox roughly 1,000-fold. Aralez sells a catalog of thousands of exclusive amino acids and offers custom synthesis and ton-scale production for pharmaceutical customers, including partners among the world's largest drug companies.
Tamarind Bio
Tamarind Bio is a San Francisco software company building cloud infrastructure that lets bench scientists run 250+ AI and physics-based models for drug discovery - tools like AlphaFold, RFdiffusion, ProteinMPNN and GROMACS - through a no-code web interface and API, without managing GPUs, data pipelines or DevOps. Founded in 2023 by Stanford computer scientist Deniz Kavi and Sherry Liu, the company serves over 10,000 scientists, including 8 of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, and raised a $13.6M Series A in February 2026.