9.20.22-Sustainability-C16-Biosciences

ARIADNA RODENSTEIN: Everyone, welcome to the startup lightning talks. Welcome to those here in person and those via the live stream. I'm Ariadna Rodenstein, events leader with MIT Startup Exchange. And I'm excited to introduce eight startups today. They're all working on very different and critical problems with very different solutions, all within the arms of sustainability.

I will give a brief overview of our program, and then we'll hear from the startups. MIT Startup Exchange was created over seven years ago within MIT corporate relations to help promote partnerships between MIT-connected startups and industry. The startups are based on MIT licensed technology, were founded by MIT faculty, staff, or alumni. And we have over 1,000 startups in the program currently.

These are some of the successful partnerships that have developed over the years. And I hope that the conversations today-- new ones, continued ones-- lead to more of these collaborations, whether it's pilots, customers, development partners, et cetera. And that's what we're here to help with as well.

These are the training technologies of MIT startups. And it's a wide spectrum. And I've noted in bold some of the ones to be touched on today by the startups, including sustainability, AI, and advanced materials.

And so how can you engage with the startups being an ILP member? One way is to join us at events like today's, conferences, webinars, et cetera. You also have access to introductions via your ILP program director all throughout the year, and also access to STEX25. This is our accelerator program for industry-ready startups.

We unveiled the latest cohort in the spring. And we're going to add a few more members in the coming months. And we have three presenting to you today-- Amogy, VEIR, and Sourcemap.

And also, you can take advantage of opportunities. These are challenges for the startups, where they can apply. And where you see a good fit, you select them. And they can work with you to help you solve a problem that you're facing in your industry. So I hope that everyone is taking advantage of all these benefits.

And please, come talk to any of us if you have any questions throughout the day. So with that, let's just hear from the startups. Brace yourselves, as Ron says. It's going to be quick. Thank you.

And first, we're going to start with C16 Biosciences. David is coming up. And you'll hear about sustainable and alternative products, not just for industry, but it's going to resonate for our own daily lives. So go ahead.

DAVID HELLER: Thanks, Ariadna. And thanks to the Startup Exchange and ILP for having me today. My name is David Heller. I am the co-founder of C16 Biosciences.

I'm also an MIT grad from the department of biological engineering. So it's great to be back in Kendall Square. I'm going to spend a few minutes today talking with you about oils.

At C16 we are bio-designing oils and fats of the future to sustain consumer goods. The vegetable oil industry is booming and exploding. By 2050, as the population is expected to reach about 10 billion people, the industry is expected to reach about a $900 billion total value.

And this is driven primarily by three main vegetable oils-- palm, soybean, and sunflower oil. Now, most vegetable oils are monoculture, which means that they require very, very specific land areas and geographies to grow. And what this leads to are very, very fickle supply chains that are really susceptible to geopolitical events-- weather and war, for instance.

So these three examples you can see on the left are really driven by one or two major national players. And even in just the last year or two, they've all been susceptible to situations that we've all heard about or experienced ourselves. COVID-19 has reduced palm production, due to labor shortages, by about 20%. The war in Ukraine and Russia has driven down sunflower oil exports by nearly 70%. And price fluctuations have also been varied by these geopolitical situations.

Now, all of these have resulted in really, really volatile supplies and prices, such that consumers really can't plan for what they're going to get at any given point in the year. And there's really nowhere for them to turn. Now, at C16, what we are building is a precision fermentation solution to this problem. We're developing a bioprocess whereby we can scale up yeast in fermentation tanks to produce oils.

We start off on the feedstock side by generating a process around waste streams and low-cost feedstocks that allow our microbes to utilize a number of different kinds of carbon sources. We've developed a proprietary yeast strain that can produce high titers of oils from these waste stream carbon sources. We've also developed a platform process whereby we can generate new strains with further optimized oil production capabilities and even ability to generate tailorable fatty acid profiles to meet our customers' demands.

We've also built a drop-in fermentation process where that yeast bioprocess can slot in to existing infrastructure and allow us to scale up this process vertically, as opposed to horizontally, the way the current industry functions. And then finally, we've built a very simple downstream process which allows us to extract these oils with at least 80% efficiency in a very simple platform.

Now, taken together, what this allows is, as I mentioned, an ability to generate tailorable oils-- so a profile of oil that matches the chemical and physical characteristics of specific vegetable oils that are needed in the industry right now. And our first product is a platform oil that neatly matches and can replace the functions of palm oil. You can see here on the left the fatty acid profile of our microbial oil versus palm and some of the other vegetable oils in this space.

Now, why palm? Palm is the most productive-- palm is the most widely used vegetable oil in the world. It makes up 38% of the total market. And as many of you know, it's a major driver of greenhouse gas emissions. It's the most destructive monoculture crop in the world.

It also is, in and of itself, a platform. It's used in a wide variety of downstream products across food and personal care. And it's also used and derived into dozens of different downstream chemicals. So targeting this space for us allows us to really target a wide array of potential customers.

And so we've been able to really grow and develop this technology over the last couple years to the tune of about a 1,000% increase in total lipid titer in the last three years and about a 300% increase in process efficiency, allowing us to squeeze out more oil per unit time, per unit volume in our fermentation capacity. We've also simultaneously filed over seven patents across method and material, allowing us to generate a nice moat around our technology. And on the scalability side, we spent 2020 really building out the technology and process optimizing; 2021, getting us into the pilot scale capabilities to generate material and further hone in on the final process.

And now we finally reached commercial scale production in 2022, which is a really exciting milestone for the company and allows us to unlock a lot of opportunity with new customers, especially as we gear up for launching products for the first time over the next six to nine months. And we've simultaneously been able to really show the value and unique properties of our oil by testing it in proof of concepts across food and personal care. So we've developed plant-based meats or alternative meats, as well as hazelnut spreads using our microbial oil, in addition to creams, balms, and soaps on the personal care side.

All of these products require slightly different chemistries to function properly. And so it's been really exciting to show our ability to use our microbial oil instead of traditional palm. We're really, really excited to be partnering in the personal care space with both formulators and product development specialists who can support us towards our first launch over the next six to nine months, especially those of you who are interested in, of course, triglycerides in your supply chains and who care about sustainability and transparency along that route. So if that sounds like you, I'm really excited to chat with you. Thanks so much.

[APPLAUSE]