Ronn Friedlander is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Aeronaut Brewing Company in Somerville, Massachusetts. A New Jersey native who came to Boston in 2009 for a PhD in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, he traded a career in medical engineering and biomaterials research for a brewery built on microbiology. He cultivates wild and custom yeast strains in an in-house lab, scaling them in a bioreactor from pilot pours to 500-gallon batches, and helped grow Aeronaut from a living-room homebrew operation into a regional craft beer brand with a second 'Cannery' facility in Everett and a 2023 strategic merger with Dorchester Brewing under the Tasty Liquid Alliance.
Eric Abbate is a synthetic-biology scientist turned CEO who led Solar Biotech, a Virginia-based startup building solar-powered, water-neutral fermentation plants to make biodesigned cosmetics, food ingredients and bioelectronic components. A UC Berkeley-trained molecular and cell biologist, he ran high-throughput genome-engineering and analytical biochemistry teams at Inscripta and was corresponding author on a widely cited paper on optimizing strain engineering for industrial-scale production. He steered Solar Biotech from lab science toward a modular 'BioNodes' manufacturing model before the company entered Chapter 11 in 2024 with plans to sell its assets and reboot.
Ryan Pandya co-founded Perfect Day in 2014 with the audacious goal of making dairy without cows. Using precision fermentation, the Berkeley-based biotech raised nearly $800 million, built partnerships with Fortune 500 food companies, and proved that animal-free whey protein could reach global markets across dozens of product categories. After a decade at the helm, Pandya stepped down as CEO at the end of 2023 to pursue future ventures, leaving behind a company that had fundamentally shifted the conversation around sustainable dairy.
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.
Douglas Friedman is CEO of BioMADE, the U.S. Department of Defense-funded Manufacturing Innovation Institute dedicated to growing the domestic industrial biomanufacturing ecosystem. With a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Northwestern and a career spanning the National Academies, the White House OSTP, and the founding of the Engineering Biology Research Consortium, Friedman is one of the foremost architects of America's bioeconomy strategy — arguing that biology, not silicon, may define the next great manufacturing revolution.
Nathaniel Chu is the co-CEO and co-founder of Tezza Foods (now Plonts), an Oakland-based food company using ancient fermentation techniques and microbial science to make genuinely complex, stinky plant-based cheese from soy milk. Holding a PhD in microbiology from MIT and a BS from Brown University, Chu spent years studying gut microbiomes before pivoting to harness those same microbial principles in food. With $12M in seed funding led by Lowercarbon Capital, Plonts launched in August 2024 in New York City and San Francisco restaurants, offering a plant-based cheddar that actually ages, melts, and smells like the real thing.
Christina Smolke is the CEO and Co-Founder of Antheia, Inc., a Menlo Park-based synthetic biology company programming yeast to manufacture complex pharmaceutical ingredients — including the active ingredient in Narcan — in days rather than the years required by traditional plant cultivation. A Stanford professor turned biotech entrepreneur, she pioneered the engineering of baker's yeast to produce opioids and other plant-derived medicines, raising over $175 million to bring her lab breakthroughs to global pharmaceutical supply chains.
Arturo Elizondo is the co-founder and CEO of The EVERY Company (formerly Clara Foods), the precision fermentation biotech pioneering animal-free egg proteins used by food brands worldwide. Born in Laredo, Texas, educated at Harvard, and seasoned by stints at the White House, USDA, and Credit Suisse, he co-founded the company in 2014 after meeting a cell biologist at a food-tech conference. Under his leadership, EVERY has raised over $471M, launched the world's first animal-free egg protein into Walmart, attracted actress Anne Hathaway as an investor, and earned Elizondo the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2023 Bay Area Award. His mission: end factory farming by making fermentation-derived proteins cheaper, cleaner, and better than the real thing.