Laura Katz is the founder and CEO of Helaina, a New York biotech company that uses precision fermentation to produce human-identical bioactive proteins. Its first product, effera, is the world's first commercially available human lactoferrin made through yeast fermentation. A food scientist by training and once NYU's youngest adjunct professor in Food Science, Katz started the company in 2019 from her Lower East Side kitchen after hearing a podcast about the black market for breast milk. She has raised more than $80 million to move Helaina from research into a commercial ingredient business.
Fengru Lin is the co-founder and CEO of TurtleTree, a biotech company making dairy proteins without cows. A former Google account manager who took up cheesemaking as a hobby, she went hunting across Asia for clean raw milk, was horrified by what she found on the farms, and started a company to make milk in a lab instead. TurtleTree pivoted from full cell-cultured milk to precision fermentation, and now produces lactoferrin, a high-value milk protein once called 'pink gold,' using microbes instead of herds. She has raised roughly $44 million and made EDGE's 35 Under 35 and Her World's Young Woman Achiever lists.
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).
TurtleTree is a biotech and food-tech company that makes lactoferrin - one of the rarest and most valuable proteins in cow's milk - without the cow. Using precision fermentation, its flagship ingredient LF+ recreates the bioactive milk protein at scale for use in immunity, gut health, sports nutrition and infant nutrition products. In 2025 TurtleTree became the first company in the world to win an FDA 'No Questions' GRAS letter for precision-fermented lactoferrin, clearing it to commercialize in the U.S.