Industrial Bio Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2025

Ginkgo Bioworks is the organism company. We design custom organisms for customers across multiple markets. We build our foundries to scale the process of organism engineering using software and hardware automation. Organism engineers at Ginkgo learn from nature to develop new organisms that replace technology with biology.

C16 Biosciences is decarbonizing consumer products supply chains by producing next-generation ingredients. The company's biomanufacturing platform produces better performing, more sustainable alternatives to oils and fats, and their first product is an alternative to palm oil. The company owns and operates Palmless™ alternative fats and oils.

Solugen is decarbonizing the chemistry of everyday life with enzymes and innovative metal catalysts. Our new to the world Bioforge platform technology can produce high value chemical goods that are biobased and carbon negative, at cost on par with current technologies. We are making sustainable chemistry accessible to all living things, to ensure a prosperous world exists for generations.

Brown Foods is a Stanford, Rice University and IIT Delhi alumni venture building the next-generation of food products. They are creating UnReal Milk- lab based, clean milk - extremely sustainable 'real milk' but made without any cows. Unlike any other option in the USD 22 billion dairy alternatives market today, it will be exactly similar to cow’s milk in terms of nutritional profile, taste, texture and could also be processed into butter, cheese and ice creams. They envision to disrupt the USD 700 billion conventional dairy market by giving the world its 1st 'cow free' real milk option, reducing the carbon footprint of milk by over 90% while being completely cruelty-free.

Culture Biosciences grows cells for biotech companies. Our customers genetically modify organisms to produce new therapeutics, materials, fuels and foods. We help them quickly run experiments and develop manufacturing processes so they can get their products to market faster. We've built proprietary software and automation systems to make operating our bioreactors more efficient than existing systems. We also provide customers with new software tools that help them analyze and contextualize their data. We are currently serving a number of biotech customers and scaling out our infrastructure.

Design, simulate, and test your proteins 100x faster with the end-to-end no-code platform for protein engineering. Powered by Amina, our AI agent. With Amina, one protein engineer can do the work of 10. Describe what you want to achieve and Amina will handle everything else – from research and design to simulation, folding, docking, and protein characterization. It asks clarifying questions if needed, intelligently understands and performs the task, and analyzes your results within the context of your project.

The future of medicine is taking shape, but scaling it remains a challenge. Some of the biggest breakthroughs in next generation therapies are being held back by manufacturing constraints. The science is moving fast, but the infrastructure is still catching up. Our VectorSelect platform is designed to unlock the scale these therapies need to survive. We combine massively parallelized screens with computational insights to engineer high yield cell lines and production technologies — accelerating the manufacturing of advanced therapies from the inside out.

Future Fields has developed the world's first multicellular advanced biomanufacturing platform for the production of the most challenging recombinant proteins. We help companies in biotech, life sciences, and pharma by manufacturing their proteins.

Founded in 2010, Lygos is providing biotechnology solutions for today’s renewable chemical challenges. They engineer microbes to convert sugars into high-value, industrial chemicals, targeting compounds where biological production is cost-advantaged over petrochemical production.

Synvivia applies chemical control over cell behavior. This allows us to optimize biomanufacturing of high-value biopharmaceutical products.

Mytos builds robots for manufacturing human cells. Operators input stem cells, and our platform turns them into specific cells such as neurons and heart cells over multiple weeks. Last year, patients were cured of Parkinson’s, vision loss, and Type 1 diabetes using stem-cell derived cells. We need 1000x the global capacity to produce these cells, and treat millions of patients. But today these Regenerative Medicines are produced by hand, meaning they’re too expensive and don’t scale. Mytos has fully automated production of these cells, making it scalable. We have our first manufacturing deal - neurons for treating Parkinson’s - and we’re in conversations with majority of the other top players.

DNA has emerged as a compelling data storage medium due to its density, longevity, and eternal relevance compared to current memory technologies. However, the high price of synthesizing DNA remains a major bottleneck for adoption of this promising storage solution. We are pioneering new approaches to synthesizing DNA for data storage with enzymes and custom digital codecs. We are building an interdisciplinary team to build the world's most scalable information infrastructure in DNA. We seek technical experts in enzyme engineering, chemistry, hardware engineering, and information theory. We also seek business development to identify emerging markets for early use cases of our technology.

At iMicrobes, we believe there are opportunities for biology to solve our biggest problems. Our mission is to work with the world’s largest companies to use new raw materials and recycle waste for chemical production, polymers, agriculture, and space exploration.

Rebellyous Foods is a food manufacturing technology and production company defined solely to catapult meat alternative production toward price parity with animal-based meat. Rebellyous implements novel food manufacturing equipment and processes in large-scale production to produce low-cost plant-based meat at high volumes. These goals are achieved through uniquely designed food products, the use of high-throughput manufacturing automation and ‘smart’ production centers, and the development and utilization of new innovative low-energy manufacturing tools. Working closely with industry partners, Rebellyous makes plant-based meat sustainable, affordable, and widely available.

We are making coffee for caffeine sensitive people. We do this by producing the world's first caffeine replacement, paraxanthine. It's better than caffeine at waking you up and causes fewer side effects, like anxiety and jitteriness.

Pando is an AI-driven synthetic biology company revolutionizing enzyme engineering for the pharmaceutical industry. Our ultra-high-throughput screening platform screens 1000-fold more enzymes 75% faster and 80% cheaper than traditional methods. This empowers our generative AI to efficiently optimize enzymes across multiple properties, delivering high-performing, tailored enzymes that reduce costs and enhance efficiency.

We are building the next generation of deep-learning models for enzyme design to slash the cost of chemical manufacturing. The $6 trillion chemical industry is flawed: It produces 20% of industrial greenhouse gases, and is responsible for 15% of global energy usage. Enzymes offer a far more sustainable alternative to chemical synthesis and have already revolutionised how a select few chemicals are produced. The problem is each enzyme takes years of trial and error to develop. Our enzyme models learn the principles of catalysis, allowing us to design enzymes for each reaction, in days not years.

We build software to manage, analyze, and optimize bioprocessing data. Our initial customers are bio-industrial companies, who produce various products in bioreactors.

Kingdom creates and sells Superculture® ingredients. Our Superculture® ingredients are an entirely new class of clinically-validated postbiotics that target the root causes of unmet pet health needs. Superculture® Pet Oral and Superculture® Pet Immune are our first two breakthrough ingredients, driving industry-leading efficacy and unlocking new marketing claims for brands.

Volta Labs is a genomics applications company that has developed a cutting-edge digital fluidics platform to maximize performance and scalability of sample preparation in genomics while providing unparalleled consistency. Volta is transforming the way biological research and analyses are performed, allowing scientists to focus on what they do best -- pushing the boundaries of biology. As a collective of scientists and builders working at the intersection of engineering and biology, we imagine a world where extracting vital information from biological samples is as simple as pressing a button. That's our vision, and we're turning it into reality. Our HQ is in Boston’s Seaport, where we develop and manufacture our technology. We believe in cross-functional collaboration and continuous learning – whether your interest is in biology, MechEng, CompEng, or simply joining a fast-growing startup striving to make the world a better place, we'd love to welcome you to our team. Check out some of our blog posts to learn more about work life at Volta.

ACX is developing a new standard for precision agriculture technologies by providing sustainable, eco-friendly alternatives to chemical pesticides. Our mission is to transform agriculture through sustainable biological crop protection that increases yields while safeguarding the environment, farmers, and consumers.

We are developing an implantable therapeutic tissue that will be surgically delivered to patients suffering from end stage renal disease. Upon implantation, this tissue will supplement the patient's renal function, eliminating their dependency on dialysis and improving their disease status. This has the potential to not only get these patients off dialysis - a significant impact for them and their families - but to greatly extend the time required before kidney transplantation is essential.

Our mission -To ensure current and future generations have access to clean soil, water & air. -To protect and restore earth's beautiful and diverse ecosystems. -To undo the harm of industrial activity on the planet and ensure future industrial activities are more sustainable. Our research -We develop new bio-based solutions that break down and remove toxic chemicals from the environment.  We also develop bioreactor based solutions which remove toxins from industrial production pipelines, ensuring contaminants are never released into the environment. -To do this, we've partnered with Nature. Specifically, we have harnessed the power of one of Nature's smallest but most powerful technologies: enzymes. Enzymes are everywhere. They break down the food in your stomach, remove dirt from your clothes, and make our beer. At BluumBio, we look for enzymes found in bacteria, algae, plants and other living organisms that naturally degrade toxic chemicals. We then make these enzymes work better in the lab and come up with develop new applications for these technologies.

Reshape Biotech builds lab robots that automate the everyday tasks of microbiologists, from filling plates to analyzing images. Other companies try to sell “one lab robot that does everything”. But those robots become so complicated that they sit unused on the shelf. We build one robot for each function, which makes them easy to use.

Ansa Biotechnologies is developing a new way to make DNA that will be faster, cleaner, and more accurate than existing methods. Currently, DNA is manufactured via a chemical method that has remained mostly unchanged for 35 years. Our enzyme-based approach promises to dramatically accelerate innovation in biological research and biotechnology, including therapeutics, diagnostics and biomanufacturing.

CB Therapeutics is a synthetic biology company focused on bringing cannabinoid and tryptamine therapeutics to the clinic and commercial markets to treat depression, PTSD, opioid addiction, alcoholism, pain, and other mental health problems.

About Us Volumetric is a recognized world leader in building living multicellular tissues, with a focus on replicating discrete functions of the human body for basic mechanistic biology, laboratory testing and screening, and drug development. Founded in 2018 by Bagrat Grigoryan and Jordan Miller as a spin-out from Rice University, the full potential of our work is to build whole human organ replacements for patients, made from their own cells. Our Technology and Approach We have invented a suite of breakthrough 3D bioprinting technologies, featured on the cover of Science, that can build human tissue with complex blood vessel networks. We are leveraging this technology in the short term to build patient-specific tissues for drug safety and efficacy testing. Patient cells are taken from a biopsy, added to our proprietary 3D printed tissues, and then drug compounds are injected through the blood vessel network to mimic actual drug delivery in humans. Our vision is that our technology will provide rigorous, reproducible, and predictive outcomes for patients, resulting in drastically improved outcomes for diseases like cancer. More broadly, we see the full potential of our mission as being able to produce functional tissue and organ replacements for diseased or damaged vital organs in the body such as the lung, liver, pancreas, kidney, and heart.

Creating the next generation of seafood with plants and biotechnology. No compromises on taste and health while winning on price and consistency. First products are raw tuna and smoked salmon.

Shiok Meats is a cell-based clean meat company, exclusively working on seafood. Shiok Meats is the first cell-based meat company in Singapore and SE Asia and we employ cellular agriculture to grow seafood meat in the laboratory using cells instead of animals. Shiok in Singapore English slang means fantastic and enjoyable. Our meats are animal-, health- and environment-friendly with the same taste, texture and nutrients, but no cruelty. Our mission is to bring delicious and healthy meat by harvesting from cells instead of animals.