Chris Kantrowitz, Co-Founder and CEO of Quorum Earth
“Varroa mites are a huge problem because we die if bees die. It comes down to that.”
Quorum Earth has raised $275,000 from SOSV IndieBio.
Biopesticides made from Fungi
Pollinators, including bees, butterflies, and more, boost global crop production by $237-$577 billion yearly. However, the varroa mite, now present on every continent with significant honeybee populations, poses a major threat to these essential pollinators and the agricultural benefits they provide.

The varroa mite is the leading cause of bee colony collapse. The current solutions aren’t good enough, or the problem wouldn’t exist. In the U.S., at least 45% of commercial colonies are infected with varroa; between 2023 and 2024, 55.1% died off. Unless we want food shortages and price spikes, the world needs a biopesticide that lays waste to varroa.

Quorum Earth turns the fungi metarhizium into a biopesticide that can kill almost anything, including varroa. Metarhizium is non-toxic, safe for bees, and highly effective. However, no one has commercialized metarhizium successfully because it struggles when taken out of its natural habitat. So, Quorum’s platform naturally modifies metarhizium to kill almost any pest. The modifications are so minimal that regulators consider the altered fungi genetically identical to the original. That means approval for new products can be completed faster and cheaper than ever before.

Quorum Earth was founded by Chris Kantrowitz, a six-time gaming, software, and biotech founder, and Nicholas Naeger, PhD, an entomologist who has spent 20+ years trying to save the honeybees. Their advisors include Paul Stamets, the world’s leading mycologist, and a world-class team of Ph.D.s experienced in pesticide regulation and manufacturing. 


In 2025, Quorum will begin selling its varroa product internationally. Varroa is only the beginning—Quorum Earth is on a mission to kill as many bugs as possible without harming the planet.

Alejandro Buffo Sempé, Co-Founder and CEO of Giraffe Bio
"By enhancing yields and unlocking value from previously uneconomical resources, Giraffe Bio is reshaping mining. Through innovations in biology, hardware, and AI, we are enabling a more efficient and sustainable way to meet the rising demand for critical minerals."
Giraffe Bio has raised $525,000 from SOSV IndieBio and the Genesis Consortium.
Upcycling Critical Minerals
Mining generates over 100 billion tons of waste annually and accounts for 4% of global energy use—much of it grinding ores. About 70% of copper reserves remain trapped in low-grade ores, and by 2035, copper supplies are projected to fall 31% short of demand.

The global transition to net-zero emissions hinges on the mining of critical minerals, yet copper and lithium production, projected to grow 30% and 465% by 2050, will still fall short of meeting demand. Mining faces daunting challenges: 70% of copper remains locked in low-grade ores, and extracting it is increasingly uneconomical due to the massive amounts of water, energy, and chemicals required. Moreover, developing one new mine can take over a decade and billions of dollars, leaving a widening gap between supply and demand.

Giraffe Bio, a Latin America-based company, is revolutionizing mining through the development of cell-free biomolecules that bind to specific metals in low-grade ores and tailings, enabling their extraction with unprecedented efficiency and sustainability. These biomolecules are custom-engineered to target each mine’s unique geological profile, delivering unmatched selectivity, higher yields, and faster processing times while significantly reducing energy, water, and chemical consumption.

Giraffe’s technology has boosted copper recovery in flotation processes by 20% during lab tests and reduced lithium extraction times from months to hours. With plans to expand into nickel, gallium, and rare earth metals, Giraffe Bio is turning mining’s toughest challenges into opportunities, unlocking value from waste streams and enhancing sustainability. Led by Alejandro Buffo Sempé and Juan Pablo Fernandez, PhD, Giraffe Bio brings together expertise in commodities, genomic and biochemical innovation, and sustainable technologies. The company’s mission is to help the mining industry meet the world’s energy transition needs while safeguarding our planet.

Theresa Hoffmann, Co-Founder and CEO of NANOPLUME
"Insulation has not been a sexy topic, but it is a universal necessity, touching every aspect of our daily lives. NANOPLUME aims to replace the world’s outdated insulation technologies with bio-based aerogels that are energy-efficient, space-efficient, and upcycled from plentiful waste streams."
NANOPLUME has raised $525,000 from SOSV IndieBio and the Genesis Consortium.
Super-Insulating Biomaterials
Heating and cooling account for roughly half of global energy consumption and are responsible for more than 40% of energy-related CO2 emissions.

The world depends on insulation that wastes up to 60% of heating and cooling energy, is heavy and bulky, and is 80% derived from petrochemicals. There’s been little innovation in this $65 billion industry, which still sells thick glass, sand, and plastic composites invented nearly a century ago. Aerogels—the lightest, thinnest, and best insulating materials known—could disrupt the insulation market. But so far, they’re too expensive and fragile for anything but niche uses.

Enter NANOPLUME which has developed a bio-based aerogel that is strong enough for the built environment and three times more insulating than mineral wool and fiberglass insulation. NANOPLUME upcycles widely available biowastes and uses conventional industrial equipment to produce this aerogel. The resulting insulation is affordable, biodegradable, dust- and mold-free, fire-retardant, and composed of 99% air.

Currently, a large housing manufacturer is testing NANOPLUME’s aerogel as a thermal break material for the floors, windows, and doors in timber-frame homes. Installed throughout structures, aerogels could enable builders to use less load-bearing material, excavate less dirt, and build more housing per hectare of land. This could increase profit margins for builders while reducing heating and cooling costs for homeowners.


NANOPLUME was founded by Theresa Hoffmann, a deep tech venture developer, and Chemical Engineers Tara Love, PhD, and Tafadzwa Motsi, PhD and MBA. The team has significant experience developing and commercializing bio-materials. They aim to improve energy efficiency, space efficiency, and circularity across many industries by introducing a long-overdue advance in insulation technology.

Jo Marini, Co-Founder and CEO of Mothership Materials
“The bioeconomy is growing faster than its supply chain. Companies need feedstocks that don’t compete with food systems or rely on fossil fuels. We’re here to unlock that missing piece—turning agricultural waste into low-cost, carbon-negative inputs.”
Mothership Materials has raised $275,000 from SOSV IndieBio.
Ag waste to power the bioeconomy
Agricultural waste accounts for up to 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions—more than air and car travel combined.

The $5 trillion bioeconomy aims to produce next-generation food, fuels, and fabrics, but it faces a critical bottleneck: a shortage of affordable, carbon-negative feedstocks. Global demand for sugars and cellulose will soon outstrip supply, threatening cost and scalability challenges for industries like precision fermentation, bioplastics, upcycled textiles, and green building materials. Meanwhile, 2 billion tons of agricultural waste are burned or left to rot annually, emitting methane and CO₂—a missed $2.6 trillion opportunity. 

New York-based Mothership Materials solves these challenges by transforming agricultural waste into circular feedstocks for the bioeconomy. The company’s patented TRACE™ platform operates directly at the waste source—whether on farms or industrial sites—using solar energy to extract sugars, cellulose, and other high-value molecules. Mothership Materials can already produce sugar and cellulose at a lower cost than conventional suppliers, making them competitive in this $500 billion market. 

TRACE™’s modular, input-agnostic design allows it to process diverse waste streams, while its co-valorization capabilities extract multiple nutrients simultaneously, reducing costs and driving circularity. Once deployed, TRACE™ mitigates up to 80% of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with agricultural waste while offsetting the carbon footprints of conventional farming and food processing. While in the IndieBio program, the company signed 5 global corporate contracts, began paid pilots, and expects to be in market within eight months of program completion.

Jo Marini, 4x founder and MBA professor, and Agnes Ostafin, PhD, chemical physicist and expert in materials science, launched Mothership Materials in 2022. They aim to build a circular supply chain for the bioeconomy and empower industries to decarbonize.

Ahmad-Reza Saadat, Co-Founder and CEO of Asta Bio
“Radiation is one of the most effective tools we have to treat cancer. The challenge is harnessing that power to target tumors more precisely without harming the patient and to make it more widely available. That’s what we're doing.”
Asta Bio has raised $525,000 from SOSV IndieBio and the Genesis Consortium.
Reimagining Cancer Treatment with Superior Targeted Radiotherapies
18 million cancer patients are diagnosed each year worldwide, with the majority suffering from advanced metastatic disease. About 90% of patients living with metastatic cancer will die of it.

To treat metastatic cancer, a radiotherapeutic must deliver a potent isotope to the tumor and keep it there long enough to kill the cancer, but clear quickly enough to avoid harming healthy tissue. So far, few radiotherapeutics have managed to meet both requirements.  

Boston-based Asta Bio aims to overcome these challenges with 211-Astatine—the most druggable alpha-emitting radioisotope and the only one that is made in a cyclotron rather than derived from uranium decay. It has shown immense potential to cure metastatic cancers in clinical studies. 

Asta Bio engineers Radiobody™ molecules to target 211-Astatine to metastatic cancers. Derived from alpaca nanobodies, these multispecific targeting molecules remain within tumors for up to two days but clear the rest of the human body within hours—long enough to kill the cancer but short enough to avoid harming healthy tissue.  

Initially, Asta Bio will focus on cancers of the lung, breast, head, neck, and gastrointestinal system. Their plan is to administer 211-Astatine containing Radiobodies™  intravenously in an advanced metastatic setting or following tumor removal to kill surviving cells that can lead to multi-organ metastasis. Currently, Asta Bio is conducting animal studies in partnership with Duke University.

Asta Bio was founded by Ahmad-Reza Saadat, a survivor of childhood cancer and biopharma executive, and Rebekah O’Donnell, PhD, engineer, immunologist, and expert in tumor physical and biological structure. Both have over 20 years of experience and have worked at venture-backed pharma startups, including several that went public. Their goal is not merely to prolong life for cancer patients, but to cure their disease.

Dr. Jakub Dziegielowski, Founder and CEO
"Bactery’s ambition is to not just be a sensor battery company but to develop a platform with many applications in rural and urban electrification. As we continue to upscale our power densities, the doors will open to those possibilities."
Bactery has raised $275,000 from SOSV IndieBio.
Green energy right at your feet
As of 2024, an estimated 225 million sensors have been sold for use in precision agriculture. They rely on single-use batteries or high-maintenance solar systems.

The $10 billion precision agriculture industry is struggling to power the millions of sensors it needs to improve crop yields, reduce costs, and support food security amidst climate change. Farms are usually remote and lacking in energy infrastructure, but sensors reliant on single-use batteries or solar systems are prohibitively expensive because they require maintenance. Someone has to replace dead batteries and clean dust off the solar panels. 

UK-based Bactery has developed a battery system that draws electricity from natural bacteria as they break down organics in agricultural soils, releasing electrons. In one year, a single Bactery can generate the amount of energy stored in ten AA batteries—double what a typical sensor requires. The low-profile device sits submerged almost entirely underground, safely out of the way, and requires no additional infrastructure or maintenance. Bactery calculates that its units, built to work for over 25 years, are 5,000 times less expensive than solar units over their lifetimes. And like solar, they generate zero carbon emissions during use.  

Drs. Jakub Dziegielowski, Mirella Di Lorenzo, and Benjamin Metcalfe, co-founders of Bactery, have collaborated at the University of Bath for over five years and are considered the world’s top researchers in soil electricity generation. They’ve shown that a Bactery could, eventually, produce up to 4 watts per square meter of soil, promising a future where one-quarter of an average U.S. lot can power an entire home.

Emilio Molina, Co-Founder & CEO of Semion
“I’m the third generation of a farming family and started this company after witnessing the destruction that pests caused to my father’s farm. Helping farmers thrive is my purpose, and it’s what I want to dedicate my life to.”
Semion has raised $275,000 from SOSV IndieBio.
Restoring crops’ ability to defend against pests
In Argentina, warming temperatures have increased corn leafhopper populations and allowed them to reach new areas. During the 23/24 season, corn yields fell by 20% on average, resulting in a $2.2 billion loss. The pest is beginning to spread into the U.S.

The world’s $6.2 trillion in crop production depends on domesticated plants that have been optimized for yield, not resilience. Their defensive mechanisms against pests have been silenced, and in their stead, chemical pesticides have protected crops, ending hunger in much of the world. In a changing climate, however, pests are spreading and evolving quicker than pesticide makers can adapt, putting global food supplies in jeopardy.

Semion turns the table on pests with sprayable biological products that activate dormant defense mechanisms in crops. Its first solution targets the corn leafhopper, a major corn pest devastating crops in the Americas.

In field trials, Semion’s solution effectively controlled the pest and its associated diseases, resulting in an average yield increase of 30% compared to untreated crops—at one-third the cost that farmers would have otherwise spent on ineffective pesticides. Pests are unlikely to evolve resistance to Semion’s treatment because it activates plants’ diverse natural defense mechanisms, including dynamic and indirect defenses like attracting natural enemies, which are challenging for pests to overcome.

Semion’s CEO, Emilio Molina, grew up in a farming family and saw firsthand how increasing reliance on pesticides made their livelihood unsustainable. At age 22, Molina received a $100,000 grant from Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian to drop out of college and do something about it. He co-founded Semion with chemical ecologist Victoria Coll Aráoz, PhD, agricultural engineer Alejandro Forlin, and entomologist Jorge Hill, PhD. Their mission is to create novel pest control technologies to help farmers thrive and secure the global food supply.

Emmie Fan, Co-Founder and CEO of Tinkeso Therapeutics
“The human immune system has a greater ability to fight off cancer and autoimmune diseases than we realize. With natural killer T (NKT) therapies, Tinkeso is harnessing that ability for patients with some of the most difficult-to-treat cancers.”
Tinkeso Therapeutics has raised $275,000 from SOSV IndieBio.
Pioneering novel therapy with natural killer T (NKT) cells
The global oncology drugs market is expected to grow from $231 billion in 2024 to over $532 billion in 2031, driven by demand for more targeted therapies.

Medical researchers have genetically modified T cells to recognize and attack cancers, but they’ve run into some obstacles. Chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) therapies are expensive ($373-475K per treatment), ineffective against solid tumors, potentially neurotoxic, and require gene editing if they’re sourced from healthy donors. That severely limits their potential for commercialization. 

Tinkeso Therapeutics is developing off-the-shelf, allogeneic invariant natural killer T (iNKT) therapies that harness the power of the innate and adaptive immunity to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases. Its CAR-iNKT cells last a long time in freezers and can be used on demand. With its proprietary iNKT cell expansion platform, Tinkeso can generate enough doses for up to 500 patients from one donor leukopak, making the therapy more affordable and scalable than CAR-T alternatives. 

Tinkeso has completed the preclinical development of TINK-101, a therapy for two types of leukemia (T-ALL and AML). In animal studies, TINK-101 doubled the survival time for mice with T-ALL, while 50% of mice with AML were cancer-free one year following treatment. Tinkeso will conduct clinical trials in China in 2025 before pursuing Phase 1/2 trials in the U.S. 

Tinkeso was founded by Jerry Zhou, PhD, MD, former professor at the University of Minnesota and New York Medical College and inventor of two NKT patents. He is joined by co-founder Emmie Fan, MBA, MS, a biotech executive with over 25 years of combined experience in business and R&D at Novartis, Roche, Merck, and AbbVie. With Tinkeso, they are developing novel CAR-iNKT cell therapeutics with the potential to treat a wide range of cancers.

Gabriel Levesque-Tremblay, co-founder and CEO
“This is a trillion-dollar market because we're talking about the rejuvenation of almost any adult and the potential to treat or prevent 20 diseases. We are proud to push the boundaries of possibilities in the human longevity space.”
heXembio has raised $525,000 from SOSV IndieBio and the Genesis Consortium.
Rejuvenated stem cell therapy
In the United States, people over the age of 55 account for over 55% of healthcare spending—about $2.5 trillion annually.

Extending the human health span has long been a visionary goal for humanity, and Hexembio is at the forefront of achieving it. The company is revolutionizing aging and disease prevention by rejuvenating Hematopoietic Stem Cells (HSCs), also known as blood stem cells. This breakthrough offers exciting new possibilities for approaching age-related decline and chronic diseases, a phenomenon directly impacted by aging blood stem cells.

To accelerate its path to market and FDA approval, Hexembio is first targeting bone marrow transplant failure—a life-threatening condition. In preclinical studies, their approach has reduced transplant failure by up to 10 times in mice, offering hope for patients with few other treatment options.

What sets Hexembio apart from existing longevity therapies is the speed, minimal invasiveness, and lasting impact of their treatment. Blood stem cells are extracted from the patient’s bone marrow in a single appointment, rejuvenated in the lab, and then returned intravenously in a second visit. This therapy not only rejuvenates the blood system but benefits multiple organs, including the skin and hair, resulting in both improved function and a visibly younger appearance.The team behind Hexembio includes Gabriel Levesque-Tremblay (PhD), Samira Kiani (MD), Mo Ebrahimkhani (MD), and Joshua Hislop (PhD candidate)—pioneers in stem cell engineering and CRISPR technologies, as well as seasoned entrepreneurs. Their groundbreaking work has been published in Nature and featured in the New York Times. With strong backing from top investors such as Draper Associates, Gaingels, and SOSV, Hexembio is rapidly advancing toward its fundraising goals and transforming the future of human longevity.

Juan Guzman, PhD, founder and CEO of Capro-X
"We could park ourselves next to a co-packing facility where they're making yogurt one day, milkshakes the next day, and juice the day after—and upcycle all the liquid wastes into carbon-negative platform molecules."
Capro-X has raised $525,000 from SOSV IndieBio and the Genesis Consortium.
Biorefining building blocks for everyday life
The precision fermentation market is expected to grow from $2.5 billion in 2024 to over $24 billion by 2030.

Companies working in precision fermentation have ambitious plans to upcycle organic waste, but most struggle with high costs and poor scalability. They rely on a few engineered bacterial strains and must operate in short batches to keep them healthy and productive. That means stopping and restarting their bioreactors frequently, which introduces downtime and a higher risk for contamination.

Capro-X has pioneered a “microbiome refinery” that uses hundreds of bacterial species in a single fermenter to produce one highly targeted end product. The company’s novel continuous extraction technology enables continuous fermentation of waste into upcycled products for years on end. Currently, Capro-X upcycles acid whey, a difficult dairy byproduct from Greek yogurt production, into caproic acid, a platform molecule used in animal feed, fragrances, flavors, cosmetics, textiles, bioplastics, and more. 

Normally, caproic acid is derived from palm oil, an industry that drives rainforest deforestation. Capro-X not only eliminates the need for palm oil but also fixes 9.3 tons of greenhouse gases per ton of caproic acid. Thus, the company addresses three environmental challenges simultaneously.

Capro-X founder and CEO Juan Guzman, PhD worked at startups upcycling algae and brewery waste into biofuels before developing the microbiome refinery during his PhD at Cornell University. With the technology to upcycle a variety of wastes, Capro-X is at the forefront of making precision fermentation cost-effective and scalable.