“Natural ingredients is the fastest growing segment in food, personal care, and health-&-wellness industry, but large companies can’t find reliable scalable supplies. For example, in 2016 there was an acute shortage of natural citrus ingredients because of citrus greening disease. Just the year before, prices of natural vanilla increased 10X due to low supply and increased demand.

Ardra’s synthetic biology platform unlocks multiple hard to make high value compounds through the fermentation of natural sugars, and their expertise in making designer microorganisms. Their platform utilizes computational methods in conjunction with a high throughput screening of proprietary enzyme libaries. This platform has already ben validated for multiple ingredients. Ardra has one joint development agreement to scale and distribute their first fragrance, leaf aldehyde. Deeper in their pipeline is animal-free Heme, Hazelnut flavor, a ketone mono-ester, cannabinoids, and several natural colors.