Armed with a new seed capital of $6.3 million, Synonym Biotechnologies has begun the development phase of the first productive biosynthetic facilities for non-pharmaceutical applications.
Edward Shendrovich and Joshua Lachter began the company in January 2022 to develop, finance and build commercial-scale biomanufacturing facilities to provide synthetic biology producers of all sizes with flexible production capacity while giving infrastructure investors access to a new carbon-negative biosphere. The class of manufacturing assets they call “fermentation farms.”
Andreessen Horowitz, Giant Ventures, Blue Horizon, Thia Ventures and other investment funds active in decarbonization were part of the investment.
Shenderovich and Lachter closed the funding door this month and told TechCrunch via email that the preliminary round “allowed us to build an exceptional, well-rounded launch team and bring our product to market.”
“We plan to use the capital to catalyze development efforts for our facilities,” said CEO Shndrovich. “This means focusing on staffing across our design, engineering and financing teams to lay the foundations for our first penetration of our facilities and accelerate our access to strategic partnerships across the value chain.”
Synonym is developing both standardized designs and underwriting standards to fund its fermentation farms so companies can easily use them to produce better quality bioproducts at lower costs than current options. On the investor side, the company said it is building an underwriting model to provide ESG investment opportunities.
The company is also directing the US government’s recent executive order on biomanufacturing that wants to accelerate innovation in this area to achieve goals related to climate, energy, food security, supply chains, and sustainability goals.
However, Shenderovich and Lachter say this will only be possible if bio-products, such as dairy protein, polymers and resins, reach cost parity with legacy products.
And now, the infrastructure to expand properly “does not exist today” in a way that enables companies to make the quantity with the kind of quality that will meet future demand. They either have to build their own facilities – which cost hundreds of millions of dollars – or rely on contract manufacturing organizations to produce products on their behalf.
“Costs will be the driving factor for adoption, and production costs have prevented them from actually entering the supply chains,” Shendrovich said. “So the means of production for these products will be crucial, and Synonym’s core view is that when it comes to industrial infrastructure, production precedes the funding process that precedes mass adoption.”
The global contract biomanufacturing regulation market, undertaken by project-backed startups such as Planetary and Culture Biosciences, was estimated to be $22.2 billion in 2021 and is expected to double by 2030.
What Planetary is doing, Lachter said, is “really trying to bridge the capacity gap in brewing,” but where the synonym differs is its approach “to focus more on the productivity and financing of the facilities rather than the traditional CMO model.”
The company is still largely in the early stages, with the founders saying their most significant achievement was the launch of the development of the first facility that included site selection and initial design. They expect to start the facility in the third quarter of 2023.
This will be followed in the coming months by further announcements of construction, architecture and other development partners.
Originally published at San Jose News Bulletin
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