GigaOM » synthetic biology

LS9 Makes “Major Breakthrough” in Cellulosic-based Fuel Production

Justin Moresco — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:01:37 +0000

Khosla Ventures-backed LS9, which is using a genetically modified version of e.coli bacteria to make diesel, announced Wednesday that it has made a “major breakthrough” in the production of biofuels and chemicals from cellulosic biomass. The company, working with researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and the Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute, said it has developed a microbe that can produce advanced biofuels directly from cellulosic biomass, such as woodchips, in a “one-step” fermentation process that eliminates the need for additional chemicals and industrial processes.

LS9 aims to produce biofuels and renewable chemicals to replace conventional petroleum-based products, and the company said this breakthrough will enable it to do this at lower costs. Biofuels ultimately will need to compete against conventional fuels on the open market, and any technological advancement that lowers production costs should make LS9 more competitive.

The startup currently operates a 1,000-liter pilot plant in South San Francisco, Calif., that produces vehicle-ready diesel from so-called first generation feedstock like sugarcane. But the long-term goal of LS9 is to produce biofuels and chemicals using cellulosic feedstock (energy crops, plant waste, etc), which the company says would reduce the total, life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of its products.

Last year, CEO Bill Haywood said LS9 has been in the process of building a demonstration plant that it aims to complete this year. Spokesman Jon Ballesteros told us today that the company is on track to have the demo facility up and running in the “earlier part of this year.” Ballesteros wouldn’t say how large that facility would be, but Haywood previously told Earth2Tech that it would have an annual capacity of 2.5 million gallons.

Last September, LS9 raised $25 million in a third round of funding from oil giant Chevron’s venture capital arm and others, though the round was less than the $75 million-$100 million the company was asking for earlier in the year. But some critics have questioned the environmental benefits of biofuels that rely on any land-based plants, and recently venture capitalists have focused more on algae-based fuel startups such as Solazyme and Solix Biofuels.

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Amyris Closes in on $60M Round for Synthetic Diesel

Jennifer Kho — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:48:19 +0000

Amyris Biotechnologies, which is developing synthetic organisms to make chemicals and biofuels, is closing in on its third round of funding. The Emeryville, Calif., company announced Thursday it has raised $41.75 million of a targeted Series C round of approximately $60 million. The announcement represents an additional $17 million raised in less than two months.

The news that Amyris was working on the round came out in August, after the company reported to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it had raised $24.7 million toward an anticipated $62 million round. A few days later, the company said it raised $2.4 million more.

Amyris said it expects to raise the rest of the money this fall, which it plans to use to advance its goal of commercializing in 2011. The company opened its first pilot plant in Emeryville last year and opened another pilot plant, as well as a demonstration plant, in Campinas, Brazil, earlier this year. The company said it is pinning down its first commercial production site and plans to begin ordering equipment for the plant by the end of this year.

Once complete, the funding round would bring the company’s total equity capital to approximately $165 million, according to the company’s press release. Investors in the latest round so far include GrupoCornelioBrennand of Brazil, Naxos UK, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, TPG Biotech and Votorantim Novos Negocios.

The news is a sign of confidence in biofuels, which has remained one of the top venture-capital investment categories in cleantech. A study released by the Cleantech Group on Wednesday found that the transportation category, which includes biofuels, along with vehicles and batteries, raised the most money in the third quarter, while Greentech Media, which grouped biofuels with biomass and gasification, reported that the category received the second-highest amount of cash, after solar power.

In spite of all the investment, exits for biofuel startups have been slim. A report that Lux Research released Thursday found that out of 170 “non-medical” biotech VC-backed companies (which includes mostly biofuels companies), only nine have seen successful exits so far. And four of the nine exits were for genetically modified food technologies with a total value of about $160 million. Samhitha Udupa, lead author of the Lux report, said in a press release:

“VCs have been too distracted by high oil prices, had too few real guideposts, and been too smitten by the enthusiasm of politicians and a few lead investors to make a sober diagnosis of the field. New thinking is needed.”

Exits in the form of initial public offerings are likely to remain off the table in the near future, Udupa predicted, adding that more startups will exit through mergers and acquisitions in the next year as well-funded corporate investors take advantage of lower prices to buy up some of these companies. Still, Udupa expects that biofuels will continue to attract investment, with next-generation bio-energy firms seeing significant investment in the next three to five years while funding for corn ethanol startups dries up. Venture funding for agricultural and industrial biotechnology grew from $47 million in 1998 to $1.2 billion last year, according to Lux.

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Amyris Opens Synthetic Diesel Pilot Plant

Craig Rubens — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:49 +0000

The strong smell of yeast and a palpable level of excitement were heavy in the air this morning at the opening of Amyris’s first pilot plant, located in Emeryville, Calif. Technicians in white lab coats were busy harvesting some of the first few gallons of the company’s “No Compromise” diesel fuel. The “No Compromise” branding, Amyris CEO John Melo said, is meant to communicate that this biobased diesel is “as good or better performing than petroleum diesel, without compromise to the environment or economics.”

The company, which crafts synthetic biological organisms to produce chemical compounds, will fine tune its process in Emeryville over the next year-and-a-half, and it aims to begin commercial production by June 2010 in Brazil. The initial feedstock for the plant will be sugar from sugarcane, but any sugar would work with the company’s genetically-modified yeast. Melo acknowledges that cellulosic feedstocks are coming up fast, and in 5 to 10 years he says Amyris might partner with or acquire a cellulosic biofuel company.

Melo described the company’s business model as “a capital-light model to scale up fast.” The company plans to partner with existing ethanol plants and convert a portion of those partners’ production capacity to make diesel and other chemicals using Amyris IP. The startup will then buy the products back from the refiner and take them to market, Melo said. The startup has already formed a joint venture with Santelisa Vale, Brazil’s second largest sugar grower, called Crystalsev, which aims to produce 200 million gallons of fuel a year by 2011 at several of its existing ethanol plants at a price of less than $2 a gallon.

The Brazilian partnership, Melo explained, gives Amyris access to ports and ships to export the fuel. Amyris plans to import it to the U.S. and sell its to large customers, like Wal-Mart and the U.S. government. Foreign ethanol is hit with a 54-cent-per-gallon tariff as it comes into the U.S., but Amyris would be importing hydrocarbons, not ethanol, and therefore avoid the tariff. Amyris is already marketing other companies’ biofuels in the Southeast to make sure its distribution channels will work.

To date, Amyris’ strategy hasn’t seamed particularly “capital light.” The company has raised more than $120 million in capital (see previous coverage here and here) from heavy-hitting cleantech and biotech investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, TPG Biotech and DAG Ventures.

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Codexis IPO is Long on Promise – and Risk

Kevin Kelleher — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 07:00:14 +0000

Sometimes it takes an IPO to draw the spotlight to a promising idea. That may be the case with Codexis, a chemical company located in the heart of Silicon Valley with an interesting approach to synthetic biology.

Codexis, which filed on Monday a prospectus with the SEC, is in the business of evolved biocatalysts. That is, it takes a microbe or enzyme in nature and shuffles DNA sequences to create new variants, then screens for the variants most capable of developing new, potentially cheaper drugs and non-ethanol biofuels.

The company is hitting the markets with a long track record of losses, but in its favor it has lined up some well-known customers and partners. Codexis is supplying enzymes to Pfizer to help improve its Lipitor drug. It also sold a 13 percent stake Shell, cementing a deal to develop enzymes that can turn biomass into fuel.

You can’t help but wonder why Codexis is going public now, bracing one of the least friendly public markets in years with accumulated losses of $94 million. It could be that investors want help funding a high burn rate. Codexis’ cash flow over the past three years is negative $23.4 million and its prospectus notes:

We expect to incur losses and negative cash flow from operating activities for the next several years.

So will a stingy Wall Street want to help finance Codexis even as profits remain years off? The answer could just be yes, given that this is one of the first chances to invest early in a promising synthetic biology startup. But this is a lot of risk for a market that has seen too much of it of late.

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Why a .Mac service for PCs could be in the cards

Kevin C. Tofel — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 14:20:00 +0000

The web continues to quake with aftershocks of “Safari-gate”: the Apple Software Update that installs Safari 3.1 for Windows by default. I tend to side with the folks that claim this practice isn’t the most forthcoming, but there are numerous examples of other companies doing the same thing for years. In the end, it’s up to each individual user to actually examine which check-boxes are activated and therefore, which applications are installed.Having said that, I started thinking about Safari 3.1 on PCs. Maybe I’ve been spending too much time writing about file synchronization applications lately, but it got me wondering if Apple is working on a “.Mac lite” service for Windows PCs. We’re getting to the point where assuming there are PCs and Mac co-existing in the same household isn’t that far-fetched.

The immediate benefit is to leverage the Sync functionality of .Mac. No, you wouldn’t want to sync your Dashboard widgets and your Leopard Dock settings, but there’s a good bit of information you might want in sync. How about Safari bookmarks? Contacts and calendars? Will we eventually see Address Book and Mail apps for PCs out of Cupertino?Then there’s the 10 GB iDisk that .Mac offers. That’s twice the storage capacity of Windows Live SkyDrive, although that Microsoft service is currently free of charge. SkyDrive can’t be mapped as a network drive however; the iDisk appears in the Mac Finder as if it were a mapped drive for intents and purposes from an end-user point of view. And if AOL can get their Xdrive mapped in Internet Explorer, I’m thinking Apple could replicate that feat.Online backup is also in the .Mac package. Show me a PC user that doesn’t want their data backed up and I’ll show you a PC user that is bound to lose data and then complain about it. [Sorry folks, you'll get no sympathy from me].Mac also has that nifty “Back to my Mac” feature allowing you to control your Mac from another Mac. It’s a nice implementation, but when you peel off the PR spin and the simple UI, you’re left with a Remote Desktop client. Guess what, Windows has that functionality built-in as an optionally installed component and I’ve used similar functionality in Linux on my Eee PC.Maybe I’m pipe-dreaming or maybe I’ve had one too many cups of coffee this morning. By and large, I could see this happen now that Apple is pushing Safari for Windows out there. I think the browser was just the beginning and Apple is poised to leverage “switcher” households and homes that have both PCs and Macs playing nicely. I realize how much .Mac integrates into the OS, but I think there’s a case to be made here. Especially when .Mac earns Apple $99 a year in revenue per user.

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Web Worker 101: Products or Services?

Mike Gunderloy — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:00:00 +0000

If you’re an independent developer who’s decided to go solo, or even one who’s working with just a few other people, there’s one critical decision you need to make early in your company’s history: should you concentrate on products or services? That is, is it better to put your efforts into building something for resale, or to put your own skills out on the consulting market? As with many decisions, there are things to be said on both sides of the question. Here’s how they generally stack up.

Building products is often the dream of the independent software developer. It’s easy to read the stories of Microsoft or Apple starting out on a tiny scale, and to think “if I only had the right idea, I could do the same thing!” The most attractive part of being a product-oriented company is the siren song of passive income: write the code once, and sell it again and again, without any further effort beyond counting the money as it comes in.

But passive income tends to be more of a dream than a reality. Even if you write a successful application, you still need to put effort into maintaining it, marketing it, and supporting it. The “take the money and run” attitude is likely to just lead to unhappy customers and rapidly declining sales. Good product vendors are those who stick with the product and put continuous effort into it.

Even worse, if you’re just starting out, is the unfunded ramp-up time. However long it takes you to write the software is time that you somehow have to survive with no income. It can be scary to watch savings deplete as you desperately try to get something ready to sell. Some folks try to dodge this issue by writing their software at night, after a regular day job – but watch out that your employment contract doesn’t end up giving your employer possession of even your after-hours software efforts.

What about consulting, then? On the plus side, it’s much easier to hit the ground running with services than with products. Find your first client, sign a contract, and you can see income in a month. As long as you keep the work pipeline filled, consulting can be as financially rewarding as working for someone else, with the added benefit of being your own boss.

But the consulting life isn’t that simple either. Many consultants are a few weeks or a few months away from unemployment; the constant need to locate and sign the next client can get wearing. With consulting, too, there is a fixed upper limit to your income: the number of hours you can work in a week times your hourly rate. Even if you get up to the $500 per hour level, this will ultimately bring you less money than one really successful product.

The other problem with running a consulting company is that there’s no exit strategy. If you build up a small business selling software, it has value that someone else may eventually buy: the potential of continued sales. Consulting companies have no value beyond the consultants who work for them, and thus are very poor targets for selling. Consultants tend to have to keep working, even when they feel like their company is successful.

So what’s the solution? In part, you have to choose based on your own skills and ideas: what can you afford, now and later? In some cases, the happiest web workers pursue a hybrid strategy, working as a consultant but setting some hours aside for product development. This can be the best of both worlds, giving you income up front and still leaving you the chance to hit it big in the future.

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Blinded By SciVee: Science Video Online

Jackson West — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 13:32:18 +0000

If you prefer kinases to kittehs, pathogens to paparazzi, then check out SciVee, a new online video destination from the San Diego Supercomputing Center, Public Library of Science and the National Science Foundation which has been called “YouTube for scientists” by Slashdot and NewScientistTech. While I doubt any of the videos will ‘go viral,’ there will likely be plenty of content about actual viruses.

The site is structured so that scientists can put together a video presentation to go along with the traditional research paper, giving users a chance to get a sense of the topic before diving into the details. Videos are typically a scientist in front of the camera paraphrasing an abstract, often accompanied by slides. Yes, it’s pretty dry, but then one doesn’t go watching videos about computational biology looking for something with zazz.

The site itself is easy enough to navigate, it’s definitely an alpha so there are still a few kinks. At one point while watching a video, a text box popped up in the video viewer window and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make it disappear.

The creators are also promising to deliver community features like comments, profiles and peer networking, including interest groups — I’d love to see a peer review flame war break out over string theory! Sadly, science bloggers will have to do without embeds, at least for now.

It is nice to see online video being used for such worthy end. The site could prove to be a great resource not just for scientists but for science teachers and their students at different levels. I’ve got a few published science professionals in the family with a great, if rather obscure, sense of humor. This site just begs for verbal and visual puns that only a scientist would love.

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Where is the ease of use?

Om Malik — Fri, 30 Jul 2004 20:23:23 +0000

Most of you have heard me complain, bitch, moan and rant about how tech companies don’t make it easier on consumers when it comes to using technology. Apparently I am not alone. Peter Me writes in Shit is too hard to use, “I’m working on a project where I get to go into people’s homes and watch them attempt to set up an internet-enabled device (excuse the vagueness). And, without fail, they cannot. What’s interesting to me is how they fail — each time it’s different. Though often in the same part of the process, the detail that causes them to go astray varies — mistyped email addresses, password confusion, network set up, clicking the wrong link and getting lost, etc. etc. And I’m sure that with each subsequent observation, we’ll observe new hitches.” (via dashes)

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