Where Biotech Meets Biodiversity
And announcing our investment in Foray!
🪸 We’re Superorganism, the first VC for startups that benefit biodiversity. Each month we publish thoughts from the frontline, company updates, and a round-up of new happenings in the nature tech world.
In the course of human history, we’ve built skyscrapers, mass transit systems, nuclear power plants, rocket ships, and phones that can access the sum total of human knowledge (or cat memes).
Yet, none of these begin to compare to the engineering marvel that is a single living cell. Packed inside a cell membrane are the means to self-replicate, to produce hundreds or thousands of novel proteins, and to transform food into usable energy. In the case of multicellular organisms, that single cell contains the entire plan for a living body.
At Superorganism we’re endlessly inspired by nature, and believe that we’re only at the beginning phases of leveraging biology to create a more sustainable future. Managed well, this moment is an exciting one.
What Is Biotech?
Biotech is a multidisciplinary field that harnesses cellular and biomolecular processes to develop products and processes using living organisms or their components. The growth of biotech in medicine and pharma, coupled with software and computing breakthroughs, has led to a technology boom that can now be leveraged to benefit the planet.
The cost of genetic sequencing has plummeted. Sequencing a single, complete human genome has dropped from costing $100M a little over 20 years ago, to around $500 today. Read-lengths for genomes have grown, and better approaches have helped us recover DNA from soil, air, water, and even long-extinct organisms. This has made experimentation easier, cheaper, and more frequent.
Storage and compute is now widely available. With roughly 3 billion DNA base pairs in a single human genome, storage space quickly adds up. And species like the recently sequenced fork fern can have genomes 50x as long. Coinciding with our ability to sample DNA has been our ability to affordable store this information, and the increasing capacity of cloud computing to process it in realtime.
AI is unlocking even further potential. As gene sequences become cheaper to sequence and store, genetic information has become increasingly digital. The value and sheer immensity of this data makes it a prime target for AI applications. AI can crawl thousands or millions of genetic sequences to accelerate discoveries and better understand hidden relationships. It can also be a creative force, using insights gleaned to create genetic sequences evolution hasn’t yet (see: last week’s announcement of EvolutionaryScale).
Biotech For Biodiversity
Taken together, these dynamics are leading us into a golden age of biotech innovation, and which we can use as a tool to reduce biodiversity loss across many categories.
Land use change
40% of ice-free land is presently used for food production, and 96% of all mammalian biomass is us and our domestic species. Biotech can help us to feed a growing population in a warming world, all while trying to create more space for nature. We dove into this topic last month in our white paper with Triple Helix.
Biotech can be used to create crops that are more efficient (use less land, water, pesticides, fertilizer), more nutritious, or that can remain shelf-stable longer to avoid food waste. Startups like Pivot Bio harness fungi and microbes in soil to improve crop yield.
Meanwhile, the alt-foods industry is finding ways to reduce or eliminate the land footprint of food altogether. Plant-based companies like Impossible (which uses biotech for its heme molecule) are going after industrial meat production, one of the single biggest contributors to land use, deforestation, and climate change.
Companies like Upside Foods, GOOD Meat, and Orbillion go a step beyond by growing meat cells directly, although challenges around scaling, cost, and cultural acceptance remain. Others use fermentation techniques to create food alternatives, such as C16 Biosciences’ palm oil, which avoids rainforest deforestation.
Overexploitation
Unsustainable harvest of fish, timber, medicinal plants, and illegal wildlife trade leads to overexploitation of species and ecosystems. Biotech has already been used here in several capacities. Like with agriculture, alt-foods can provide alternatives to wild harvest, such as cell-based tuna like Wildtype or BlueNalu. Plant cell culture can be used to create proteins or molecules sourced from nature, lessening the pressure on biodiversity (see Foray, below). Meanwhile, field genetics tools like the NABIT can be used to identify illegal wildlife trafficking, and groups like World Forest ID can geo-locate a product back to its source using its unique chemical, genetic and anatomical signature.
Invasive species and disease
As global commerce and climate change accelerate the movement of species and diseases, biology can play a smarter, more precise role in early detection, and leveling the playing field. eDNA tools are already detecting early diseases and pest species. Vaccines may prove valuable for species at risk from like Chytrid fungus, white nose syndrome, and Varroa mites (such as Dalan Animal Health). And while more study on long-term ecological consequences is needed, gene drives may one day be effective tools to eliminate invasive species in a few generations, without the need for toxic pesticides.
Genetic monitoring and discovery
Thanks to the affordability of genetic sequencing, startups like NatureMetrics can use eDNA (environmental DNA) to affordably measure and report against a site’s biodiversity over time. Meanwhile, startups like Fauna Bio, Enveda, Basecamp Research, and others can rapidly sample genetic information to produce new bio-based medicines and cosmetics compounds. Several of these companies contribute back to scientific knowledge, and use proceeds to benefit local communities and conservation efforts.
Genetic rescue
Biotechnology is already being used to help species adapt to new and existing threats. A once-abundant, beautiful species, the American chestnut has become functionally extinct due to an introduced chestnut blight fungus. The American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project has used a simple gene edit to make “Darling” variants, which are fungus-resistant, transgenic trees that are beginning to be reintroduced to historic ranges. Organizations like Revive and Restore are at the frontier of how biotechnology can preserve and help restore biodiversity with “intended consequences,” while the startup Colossal promises to bring back recently extinct species like dodo birds, Tasmanian tigers, and wooly mammoths.
Our Biotech Bets
Even though we are in the earliest phases of what biotechnology can accomplish, we regularly see new startups that use cellular machinery to facilitate a potentially more nature-positive future. At Superorganism, we’re bullish on biotech for biodiversity, and have backed a number of founders such as:
Bluumbio gains insights from soil microbes that have evolved to break down pollutants like oil, plastics, and PFAS, and develops specialized consortia to break down target chemicals in the environment.
Funga accelerates forest regeneration by using DNA surveys to identify subsets of fungal biodiversity linked to tree growth and missing from most clear cut forests, and then enriching forests with that native microbiome to spur faster tree growth.
Planet A Foods makes a chocolate alternative through the fermentation of inexpensive, low-footprint commodity crops, avoiding tropical deforestation from cacao.
And as of last week, we’re excited to introduce our newest addition to the Superorganism portfolio: Foray.
Introducing Foray
Foray is a predictive platform to streamline production of viable cell lines from any plant species. What might have taken years to decades can be reduced to weeks or months. This step unlocks several use cases.
First, producing cell lines is necessary for plant-based cellular agriculture. If a company wants a complex array of molecules that are typically found in agricultural or wild-harvested crops (think: tea, vanilla), they can use the cell lines to produce these molecules directly. This can help with supply chain resilience, and (depending on the use case) can reduce pressure on wild species or on agricultural footprints. Creating cell lines is also a necessary step for some forms of genetic engineering work.
Second, Foray’s technology could be key to unlocking another nature restoration bottleneck: seed supply. “We are already short more than 2 billion seedlings per year - and that’s just to get halfway to meeting the reforesting potential of the lower 48 states,” Wired reports. That’s because seeds need to come from existing trees, but Foray could change that. Foray’s cell line technology combined with “synthetic seeds” (sci-fi sounding, but actually well established science) could allow tree seeds to be scaled to meet the demand. It also allows for genetically diverse and rare species to be scaled for restoration, supporting rich native forest restoration.
We’re so thrilled to be working with Ashley, her team, and our friends at Regen VC, Understorey Ventures, and Engine Ventures. You can read more about their new raise here.
Life Finds A Way
This post has been optimistic, but we could write an equally long one on how biotechnology has been misused in the past. You don’t need to be Ian Malcolm to see how some of the technologies discussed above could be misused again. This is especially true when startups are engaging with the natural world, and we take that responsibility seriously.
Founders using biotech for biodiversity should bring on advisors or team members with strong conservation credentials, have a dedicated strategy to think through and mitigate potential negative consequences, consider impacts to local communities and stakeholders, and build structures, policies, and culture to ensure environmental responsibility comes first through the life of the company.
For more depth on this topic, we highly recommend checking out Homeworld Collective, Indie Bio, Revive and Restore, SynBioBeta, Strange Natures: Conservation in the Era of Synthetic Biology by Kent Redford, and Life as We Made It by Beth Shapiro.
Notes From The Field
Updates from our portfolio companies, and from us at Superorganism
🌍 Amini was listed as a WEF 100 Tech Pioneer, and founder Kate Kallot was announced as Entrepreneur of the Year by One Young World. Read more about their work in a recent interview with UBS.
🌳 Cambium is hiring for a VP of Software Engineering and a VP of Finance.
🍄 Funga has announced a partnership with PRT Growing Services this week, North America's largest seedling provider of over 600 million seedlings annually.
🍫 Planet A Foods was highlighted in Alexander Skaarsgard’s podcast How We Fix This, and is hiring for a food technologist, a plant engineer, a quality lead, and a social media manager. Sweet!
🪴 Rosy Soil received B Corp certification.
🌿 Sway launches with pro surfer John John Florence to replace packaging in the products of their surf brand, Florence. They were also highlighted in Oceanographic Magazine, and are hiring a seaweed and sourcing specialist.
🦅 Spoor has signed GE Vernova as a commercial client. ASK: are you familiar with the build-out of wind energy infra in the US, particularly around permitting? Spoor wants to talk.
🪸 As for us at Superorganism in June…
Met with friends and colleagues in Australia, Asia, and Europe.
Spoke at TTI Biodiversity Conference, Hack Summit, and the Leadership on Purpose Summit.
Hosted a meetup with our friends at MCJ and Nature Tech Collective in London during London Climate Action Week.
Want to join a Superorganism company? Check out our Jobs Board, with 48 active jobs currently available. Start your nature tech career today!
Ecosystem News
🫂 Friends of fund
The Mills Fabrica launched Techstyle For Social Good, their flagship global innovation challenge to empower young innovators across both Techstyle and Agrifood technologies. Applications are open until July 15.
Climate Investor Pollination Launches $150 Million VC Fund to Back Climate and Nature Solutions Startups | ESG Today
Sam Power launched her first book 'Bioregional Financing Facilities: Reimagining Finance to Regenerate Our Planet'
Nature positive starts with agriculture | UBS Global
Yes, biodiversity credits can be offsets - and that would be great! | Ryan Sarsfield
‘We sold everything off, even the semen flasks’: the film about the farming couple who struck gold by rewilding | The Guardian
Adventure Scientists and Mast Reforestation launch joint seed cone program.
Naturebase launches as a new platform to site and run nature-based projects.
Conservation Imperatives: securing the last unprotected terrestrial sites harboring irreplaceable biodiversity | Frontiers in Science
☁️ Climate change
Renoster releases a public geospatial database of the locations of the world's nature-based carbon offset projects (comprising 575 project locations) | Linkedin
Running Tide, one of the most well-known ocean CDR startups, has ended global operations | Linkedin
Biodiversity loss reduces global terrestrial carbon storage | Nature Communications
Carbon stored globally by plants is shorter-lived | Science Media Center
Researchers show the link between trawls and climate change in the North Sea | Phys.org
🔬 Science
Pharmacological and behavioral investigation of putative self-medicative plants in Budongo chimpanzee diets | PLOS ONE
A new interpretation of Pikaia reveals the origins of the chordate body plan | Current Biology
Deep-learning-enabled antibiotic discovery through molecular de-extinction | Nature Biomedical Engineering
Bottlenecks in biobased approaches to plastic degradation | Nature Communications
🦧 Conservation
A new AI tool to help monitor coral reef health | Google
Atlantic sturgeon reintroduced in Sweden for the first time | Rewilding Europe
How A Frog Is Helping Scientists Understand A Deadly Amphibian Pandemic | Forbes
How AI Can Improve Ocean Health | Salesforce
Global oceans see 14th-straight month of record-shattering heat | Axios
👨🏻 Humans
Climate Change Could Make Fungi More Dangerous To Humans | Forbes
How an El Niño-Driven Drought Brought Hunger to Southern Africa | Yale E360
Boiling Point: Why razing Joshua trees for solar farms isn't always crazy | LA Times
Ancient Snake and Centipede Carvings in South America Are among World’s Largest Rock Engravings | Scientific American
Avocados are 'bad' and vegans are ridiculous: How we justify eating too much meat | Phys.org
📜 Policy
The Supreme Court weakens federal regulators, overturning decades-old Chevron decision | Associated Press
Federal Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program is a Smart Investment to Protect Biodiversity | Endangered Species Coalition
Shasta tribe will reclaim land long buried by a reservoir on the Klamath River | AZ Central
‘Life in the Ocean Touches Everyone’: U.S. Rolls Out First National Ocean Biodiversity Strategy | Smithsonian Institution
TNFD approves submission through the CBD platform | CDP Portal
Historic Nature Law Passes In Europe: Now We Need To Finance It | Forbes
Thank You!
Thanks for reading and for supporting Superorganism, and a special thank you to everyone who went above and beyond this month with introductions, diligence, advice, and help to founders:
Rich Aberman, Neeraj Aggarwal, Ieva Balciute, Lawrence Barclay, Leone Baron, Jon Biesse, Karla Brollier, David Broz, Nick Butcher, Aarav Chavda, Patti Chu, Dulma Clark, Helen Crowley, Emilie Dellecker, Joe Ferdinando, Camila Ferraz, Dan Gluesenkamp, Ben Goldsmith, Gilad Goren, Isabel Hoffman, Taylor Holshouser, Parker Hughes, Hampus Jakobsson, Ted Janulis, Kate Kallot, Alivia Kaplan, Sean Keegan, Eric Klein, Ellina Knudsen, Bonny Landers, Gabriela Leslie, Mark Lewis, Alex Logan, Iván Markman, Max Marquart, Chad Massura, Emilie Mazzacurati, Jen McGowan, Tom McQuillen, David Meyers, Janina Motter, Steph O'Donnell, Tom O'Keefe, Harsh Patel, Matt Portman, Keshav Puri, Sabin Ray, Greg Robson, Ted Schmitt, Maximilian Schwartz, Gemma Shepherd, Aadil Siddiqi, Jordan Soriot, Francesco Stadler, Jen Stebbing, Jinal Surti, Tatiana Tarnowski, Ed Thorne, Sam Tidswell, Sonam Velani, Allison Voss, Daniel Wanjira, Helena Wasserman, and Alex Weisberg.