Why we invested:

In the $220B copper mining industry, “heap leaching” of waste rock with low concentrations of ore has become a standard practice. Heap leaching works in two ways: 1) sulfuric acid is sprayed on top to trickle through the heaps, and 2) natural microbes in the heaps also help dissolve the copper mineral into solution. It’s been widely noted that the microbes can speed up leaching by up to 2x, but nobody knows why or how this happens – or how to consistently recreate it.

Transition Biomining is building a platform to control the microbes in heaps, and deliver faster leaching every time. The economic value of improving leaching is enormous – a mere 5% boost can be worth $100 million per mine annually.

Why we invested:

At a small networking event, the founders said softly to us: “we are working on a technology that can completely upend the entire sequencing industry.” We leaned in to listen; after all, the founders have been working the front lines during every major pivotal point in sequencing history: Illumina’s acquisition of Solexa in 2001, the introduction of HiSeq (2010) and Novaseq (2017) which redefined the meaning of “high-throughput,” and when Ultima’s UG100 unshackled us from flow cells. Stream goes further, to untie us from library preps, from amplification, and from the massive computational overhead of imaging-based sequencing.

Their technology leverages a proprietary method that can monitor chemical incorporations in real time, leading to 1000-fold reduction in compute, and up to 100-fold increase in speed than the technologies we have today. The best part: the sequencer itself is an order of magnitude cheaper, which solves the switching cost for customers. The engineer, scientist, and commercialization leaders on the executive team have a combined 60+ years of experience at major competitors, including Illumina, PacBio, and Ultima. We believe that SPEED will unlock and expand markets like what Netflix did to Blockbuster, what PCs did to supercomputers, what Amazon 2-day delivery did to retail, and this is the team to execute it.

The e-Fuels and carbon capture & utilization sectors rely on a mishmash of expensive membranes, chemicals, catalysts, and electrolytes, across many steps.

Computers were like this long ago. They used punchcards to input, output, and store data. Then magnetic tape. Before finally deploying microchip integrated circuits, and Silicon Valley was born.

So when it comes to the climate tech field, we have to ask: can’t we just do this with electronics?

Spiralwave is the first company in the world to demonstrate the production of liquid fuel from air in a single step. To achieve this, it took a shift in paradigm. Do it only with electronic components controlled by chips. Spiralwave is the first climate tech company to really learn from the historical wisdom of Silicon Valley: chips scale. Get it onto chips.

This makes it easier to manufacture, lowers electricity usage, and is inherently distributable.

Welcome to the era of “Direct Air Utilization.” You all know Direct Air Capture, and you all know Carbon Utilization. In a single step, SpiralWave radically brings down the energy and the costs of transforming the carbon in air and the hydrogen in water into hydrocarbon fuel. Unlike competing DAC and CCUS technologies and traditional reactors relying on vacuums, high temperatures, and pricey catalysts, SpiralWave uses chips that control electrical components.

Each SpiralWave’s reactor – The Microbeam™ – can mine CO2 from the air each day, combining it with hydrogen from river or lake water, resulting in green methanol at cost parity with grey methanol — all at room temperature and ambient pressure. The energy demand is very low; one ton of pure methanol costs 7,000 KWh.

Our second reactor – The Nanobeam™ – performs Direct Flue Gas Utilization. We skip the capture, and work directly from your flue gas, whether it’s a low CO2 concentration or high, and including CO mix or not.

SpiralWave carefully fine-tunes the pulse, the frequency, and water microdroplet parameters to bias towards the formation of methanol, as opposed to other hydrocarbon byproducts. This green-methanol is a vital building block for an emerging class of green maritime fuels. To that end, a large global transport, logistics, and energy conglomerate has expressed interest in a large takeoff agreement with SpiralWave.

Why we invested:

The world’s biggest meat, produce, and animal health companies take vast sums of money and light it on fire on a recurring basis. They don’t want to do this, but due to consistent shortcoming in pathogen detection no one has managed to avoid the steady recurrence of recall and herd losses. It is shocking that no major life sciences company has delivered a solution to this industry that wants rapid turnaround time, ease of use, and sensitivity. This is despite the prospect of huge customers, high frequency product use, long term stickiness, and willingness to pay: A single food processor who makes $5 million in revenue per day will spend $125 million a year on testing alone. This is not including the revenue losses when they have to shut down the plant to figure out where a pathogen got through their defenses.

We’ve done diligence on a ton of teams and approaches over the years and believe Hypercell checks all the boxes to drive industry-wide adoption. Their CEO (Bruno) is an industry vet, both as the builder of a billion dollar-plus animal health division and an expert in veterinary medicine. When we first met Bruno he had already been on site at several plants to dive deeply into the real problems that plague this industry, and was developing a product that solves all those needs. Their technology provides results in minutes instead of hours or days in real world settings, and is easy enough for anyone to use (even scores of MBAs). Hypercell currently has six-figure partnerships and LOIs from Cargill, JBS, FPL, and others, with even more finalizing now.

Why we invested:

Our investment in BryoSphere is an addition to SOSV’s next-gen biomanufacturing portfolio that spans a diversity of chassis, processes, vessels, and feedstocks. BryoSphere is one of the only companies in the world to use moss cells in photobioreactors as an expression system. These ancient plants are really good at making compounds to protect themselves from the sun’s UV radiation – compounds that can’t be made in any other system.

The first sign of aging isn’t wrinkles. It’s the age spots – known as hyperpigmentation. The solutions suck. Not this one. BryoSphere’s first product, BryoBright, is a natural hyperpigmentation treatment 3x more effective than existing options. This natural compound has been validated by many beauty companies, and could be added to hundreds of products, similar to the way SPF is. There’s been just one big problem – the natural molecule is too expensive to extract from plants, and nobody has been able to manufacture it affordably, even with synthetic chemistry. Enter moss to the rescue. BryoSphere is leveraging those capabilities of moss to create first-of-a-kind skincare ingredients for beauty brands, starting with BryoBright.

Why we invested:

The message from the market is crystal clear: electric vehicles need to be cheaper. Since up to 40% of an electric vehicle is the battery, and in turn 70% of the cost of the battery is in materials, it’s an imperative for the industry to develop cheaper and higher performing materials. Silicon anodes are widely considered the future – ​​they can store far more energy than graphite – but they swell 300% when loading, leading to cracking and rapid degradation.

Aqualith has solved this problem, with a silicon alloy that only swells 10% – less than graphite swell. Aqualith already has produced dozens of full pouch cells and in six months will deliver samples exceeding 300 cycle life to EV and battery partners. They are 12-16 months from an “A cell” qualification and less than 36 months from commercial production with OEMs / Tier 1s. In addition to their anode materials, Aqualith also has solutions for electrolytes and cobalt-free cathodes. Their electrolytes are non-flammable, high performance, and can handle wide temperatures (meaning they’ll work in cold weather.)

The company is raising now for pre-seed checks.

Why we invested:

For all the hype of cell therapies, to get beyond the 5% of eligible patients who receive such therapies today, the market needs 1) higher transfection success, and 2) multi-protein delivery in one construct. The founder of Able sciences are veteran drug developers who invented a self-amplifying RNA that delivers on both huge needs.

They’ve shown impressively high and durable expression of their payloads in target cells, dramatically superior to that achievable through viral based engineering. Already they’ve shown expression of two functional proteins and plan to quickly demonstrate their ability to do three or four more. They went from idea to POC on human natural killer (NK) cells in a matter of months – able indeed!

When integrated into off the shelf allogeneic cells, Able’s system can bring the cost of cell therapy under $100,000.

We’re super excited about this ability to bring multiple protein payloads to deliver a knock-out punch on cancer, creating a plug-and-play system to either own virtually universal cell therapies and high value disease targets or enable partners to create their own efficacious target combinations.

Why we invested:

For us to invest in alt proteins in 2024 requires that we see a team and product that are laser focused on solving a deeply felt commercial problem at previously unheard of speed. Since our first meeting, the NXW founders–themselves food industry veterans–have shown their ability to move fast while building trust with not just one, but a coalition of the biggest dairy and nutrition leaders across 6 continents.

They’re quickly creating a global footprint for their Marine Whey product line that drops-in and expands multiple huge core categories for their business partners. NXW will be one of the fastest companies to get to industrial scale production in the sector, and create affordable, premium-quality, great tasting products while remaining lean and capex-light.

Why we invested:

Reactosome uses synthetic nuclei as a novel class of gene therapy. This is not a “better” LNP, AAV, etc – This would be peerless in delivering very large DNA payloads ALONG WITH the transcription machinery to transcribe RNAs. As a result, the internalized nuclei can continuously pump out mRNAs into the cytosol. This is important for therapies that need to correct large defective genes or gene circuits (i.e., Duchennes, hemophilia, collagenopathies), for a longer period of time and without the inconvenience of redosing.

Reactosome is a therapeutic company at its core, but they are also pioneers of the synthetic nucleus who have left academia to direct the engineering efforts towards a synthetic nuclei that can be used in gene therapy. Compared to liposomal delivery, Reactosome’s modality would offer longer duration of effect and at a reduced immunogenicity. And compared to viral and non-viral vectors, Reactosome would have greatly reduced risk of genomic integration since the cargo DNA is contained entirely within the complex.

Why we invested:

The biggest risk in cancer immunotherapy is the safety: the cancer targets (i.e., neoantigens) are not differentiated enough from healthy cells, and can therefore lead to the immune system attacking the patient’s. When we met Dr. Corey Dambacher (the founder of Rybodyn), he said he has been sitting on a treasure trove of never-before-seen proteins that others have missed because they figured out how to interpret the proteomics data in a way that others cannot (aka probing the “dark proteome”). Among this treasure trove of novel proteins are peptides that are found ONLY on cancer cells, and not on healthy cells.

The opportunity we saw here was that Rybodyn’s huge library of neoantigens differentiate on another order of magnitude: While others target the small mutations that differentiate cancer cells, Rybodyn has found entire peptides that differentiate them. Higher specificity means better safety profile, and better efficacy. These are NOT computational predictions; these peptides have been confirmed by mass spectrometry. Rybodyn has been flying under the radar since 2018, secretly amassing over 1200 confirmed novel cancer-specific peptides (to date), and is raising antibodies against these targets now. What led us to invest in Rybodyn is the platform’s enormous reach into new cancer-specific biologics like antibodies, ADCs, cell therapies, and other indications like autoimmunity.