Y Combinator is well known for incubating successful companies that any self-respecting millennial would recognize, including Airbnb, DoorDash, and Instacart. In 2014, they opened their doors to biotech startups, including synthetic biology ones. Arguably the most famous synthetic biology startup, Ginkgo Bioworks, has been through this program, although they were a fairly mature company when they did so.
It is no surprise that synthetic biology companies are popular with Y Combinator. Of Y Combinator’s areas of interests, synthetic biology directly addresses four of their top six interests: Bio, Carbon Removal Technologies, Cellular Agriculture and Clean Meat, and Response to COVID-19.
This past week, Y Combinator had their (virtual) demo day, premiering the 98 startups in their Summer 2020 cohort. Here are the synthetic biology ones (with one additional honorable mention):
Known Medicine enables the next generation of personalized medicine by taking a patient’s tumors and culturing them so that they can be tested with different treatments, finding exactly which one will best treat the disease.
Kingdom Supercultures uses automation to find and culture new microbial strains in order to create novel fermentation-enabled foods.
inSoma is creating new protein-based biomaterials for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
Future Fields has a platform for creating serum-free growth media, a necessity for making cellular agriculture and clean meat cost-effective and scalable.
Kuleana is developing plant-based tuna for the sushi and seafood industries.
Revel is making a caffeine-replacement molecule that does away with the jitters while retaining the alertness.
Kernel is creating mRNA immunotherapies with cell-specific therapeutic expression.
Trident Bioscience uses computational models of protein structure and function to accelerate the design-build-test cycle for protein design.
Opvia accelerates R&D by providing AI-powered tools for managing and making sense of your data. And for all the synbio students out there - they have a free academic lab program.
Honorable Mention:
CarbonChain is a service for calculating your business’s carbon risk - how much is generated in your manufacturing process. This is in preparation for an increasing carbon tax. They also host a wonderful map where one can easily see carbon prices around the world. Spoiler: they are all too low.