Pow.Bio announced its $9.5 million Series A round. Re:Food and Thia Ventures led the round and were joined by Hitachi Ventures – the strategic corporate venture capital arm of Hitachi, Ltd. – with participation from Possible Ventures, XFactor Ventures, Bee Partners, iSelect, Climate Capital, Vectors Angel, Better Ventures, and Cantos.
Pow.Bio’s goal is to unlock the economic viability of sustainable biomade products by significantly driving down the high costs associated with biomanufacturing. The simple fact is that synthetic biology companies today are unable to manufacture products at a price that can displace unsustainable petrochemical or animal derived alternatives. The market impact of these biomade products is estimated to reach $4T by 2040. But until we are able to produce biomaterials at (or below) cost parity to their commodity counterparts, only the most expensive biomade products will ever be commercially viable – limiting the sustainable impact of such a promising technology.
“Early on, we identified continuous fermentation as a necessity to enable cost-competitive, sustainable food production,” said Peter Odemark, co-founder and Managing Partner at Gullspång Re:food. “We are excited to partner with Pow.Bio because of the strength of their continuous platform, the quality of their team, and their commitment and vision for a more sustainable SynBio future.”
Hideshi Nakatsu, Vice President and Executive Officer, CEO of Water & Environment Business Unit, Hitachi, Ltd., said, “Hitachi is committed to contributing our expertise in growth markets such as Bioproduction, and Pow.bio’s continuous fermentation platform represents a potential step-change in biomanufacturing economics that aligns with Hitachi’s expansion plans to enter into the Bioproduction business.”
Pow.Bio’s CTO and founder, Ouwei Wang, describes their continuous fermentation technology as solving the historical challenges that have made what some call this ‘holy grail’ of biomanufacturing so elusive. “By running a fermentation process more like an assembly line,” says Wang, “we see multi-fold increases in productivity without contamination or drift.”
Integrated within the Pow.Bio system is an intelligent AI-controlled software known as SOFe, that accelerates process optimization and will drive autonomous operation. The one-two punch of its advanced hardware and intelligent software drives 5x gains in productivity for a fraction of the capital expense of traditional systems.
Pow.Bio also announced the construction of an advanced demonstration facility in Alameda, California, designed to provide partner companies unfettered access to this novel platform.
The Alameda site is engineered for the seamless transition from gram-scale experimentation to the production of hundreds of kilograms of finished products. This facility will not only showcase the potential of Pow.Bio’s platform but also serve as a blueprint for commercial-scale deployment of the platform for the production of a wide range of biology-based products.
