indiebio
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The Fuel Startup Betting a Molecule Can Just Float Out of the Tank
Most biofuels get stuck in the same trap: make the alcohol, then spend a fortune pulling it out of the water. A four-person Houston team engineered a yeast whose product simply volatilizes away - and they think that changes the math.
The Pregnancy Test That Could Catch a Killer Before the Doctor Does
Preeclampsia kills tens of thousands of mothers a year, mostly because no one catches it in time. A team that started as classmates in Durham and Kampala wants to move that first warning from the hospital lab to the bathroom shelf.
Craig Rouskey Came Home to Build the Next Version
After labs, startups, a 110-person company and a hard shutdown, the molecular scientist returned to Joliet to rebuild Flore. His career is a study in what happens when open-science idealism meets operating reality.
Carolina Reis Oliveira Put a Biotech Lab Behind the Beauty Counter
A Brazilian biochemist crossed from tissue engineering into consumer beauty, then spent five years and 900-plus peptide tests turning laboratory discipline into a direct-to-consumer company.
HexemBio
HexemBio is a New York- and Berkeley-based biotech building what it calls the first blood stem cell rejuvenation therapy. Its Synthetic Human Yolk Sac platform recreates the embryonic environment where blood stem cells first arise, temporarily placing a patient's own aged hematopoietic stem cells into that synthetic young niche before returning them by IV infusion - rather than gene-editing or chemically reprogramming the cells. The company launched publicly in April 2026 with a $10.4M seed round led by Draper Associates, holds an FDA Orphan Drug Designation for a bone-marrow-transplant program in blood cancers, and is targeting first-in-human trials in 2027.
Yuyo Llamazares Vegh
Yuyo Llamazares Vegh is the CEO and Co-Founder of Stämm, a San Francisco-based biotech company reinventing biomanufacturing through miniaturized 3D-printed microfluidic bioreactors. A native of Argentina with a background in agricultural engineering and bioprocesses from the University of Buenos Aires, Yuyo co-founded Stämm in 2016 alongside his cousin Federico D'Alvia Vegh after spotting a fundamental gap between biology's potential and the outdated tools available to harness it. Stämm's platform - desktop-sized, modular, and scalable - is designed to make the production of biologics, cell therapies, and gene therapies accessible and repeatable at any scale. The company has raised over $17 million including a Series A led by Varana Capital with participation from Draper Associates and SOSV's IndieBio, and has attracted former Merck KGaA CEO Stefan Oschmann to its board. Yuyo was selected as an Endeavor Entrepreneur in 2023.
Mohan Iyer
Mohan Iyer is a General Partner at SOSV's IndieBio SF, the world's leading biotech accelerator. With 25+ years operating life science startups across Genentech, Tethys Bioscience, Second Genome, and Pendulum Therapeutics, he brings rare bench-to-boardroom experience to pre-seed biotech founders. Trained as a chemical and biomedical engineer before earning his MBA from Yale, Iyer has spent his career translating disruptive biology into products the world actually needs — and now bets on founders doing the same.