gas-fermentation
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Alan Shaw and the Food-from-Fuel Bet
A chemist who spent years trying to make fuel from plants found a more useful reversal: make protein from methane. Alan Shaw’s second biotech act is a lesson in recognizing the market hiding inside the science.
Calysta
Calysta is a San Mateo, California biotechnology company that uses a patented gas-fermentation platform to turn methane into FeedKind, a single-cell protein for aquaculture, livestock and pet feed - and increasingly human food. Its bacteria eat natural gas instead of arable land, plants or animals, producing protein with a low environmental footprint. Backed by Cargill, BP and Temasek and partnered with Adisseo through the Calysseo joint venture, Calysta opened the world's first industrial-scale single-cell protein plant in Chongqing, China in 2022.
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.
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.
Noah Helman
Noah Helman is the co-founder and CEO of Industrial Microbes (iMicrobes), an Alameda, California synthetic biology company that engineers the central metabolism of microbes so they can eat cheap, renewable feedstocks - ethanol and methane - and spit out the chemicals normally pumped from petroleum. A Stanford applied-physics PhD who spent roughly a decade in physics labs before crossing into biology, Helman co-founded the company in 2014 with two fellow alumni of the biofuels startup LS9. iMicrobes targets drop-in, cost-competitive, net-zero versions of acrylic acid (for paints and adhesives) and acrylonitrile (for carbon fiber). The company went through Y Combinator's W15 batch, holds more than 20 patents, raised a $10M+ seed round in late 2024, and in 2025 announced it had scaled production of 100% bio-based, high-purity acrylic acid.
Shannon Nangle
Shannon Nangle is a microbe-wrangling scientist turned CEO who co-founded Circe Bioscience to make fats, oils, and even chocolate out of thin air. Her company feeds carbon dioxide, water, and electricity to engineered microbes that grow like plants and excrete valuable molecules, producing food and industrial ingredients in a carbon-negative way. Spun out of Harvard's Wyss Institute in 2021, Circe made what it calls the world's first gas-fermentation-derived chocolate and has raised over $17 million to scale a manufacturing process Nangle spent six years building.