Industrial biotechnology sits at a strange inflection point. On one hand, we have proof that biology can solve real climate and supply-chain problems—materials, ingredients, chemicals, therapeutics. On the other hand, we have a graveyard of failed companies that quietly burned through hundreds of millions because the path from petri dish to profitable product is still far more treacherous than our sector likes to admit.

I’ve spent the past few years interviewing hundreds of biotech founders, corporate R&D leaders, and investors on the Grow Everything podcast, and the story is always the same: the science is brilliant, the ambition is high, and the bottlenecks are brutally, consistently predictable. What industrial biotech needs now isn’t just more capital. It needs coordination. It needs new patterns of partnership. And it needs a reality-check about what it actually takes to scale biology into the world.

Biology Is Already Winning—Quietly, and in Unexpected Places

Here’s the part that makes me so stubbornly optimistic: biology works.
We’re not waiting on a scientific breakthrough. We’re waiting on a systems breakthrough.

Look around and you’ll see bright spots everywhere:

• K18 Hair used computational biology and protein engineering to deliver a blockbuster consumer product—no biomanufacturing fairy dust, just smart science and ruthless focus on product-market fit.
  
  
• Genomatica and Cargill proved that fermentation-based 1,4-butanediol, a building block for so many products, can hit real world industrial-scale economics—not excel sheet imagination land.
  
  
• LanzaTech didn’t just run pilots—they scaled gas fermentation into full-scale commercial systems that transform industrial waste emissions into finished fuels and consumer products with partners like Unilever.
  
  
• Antheia is delivering the next generation of biosynthesized pharmaceutical ingredients, showing how synthetic biology can localize and secure critical supply chains.
  
  
• And hundreds of consumer brands—from apparel to skincare to food—are quietly reformulating with bio-based materials because customers increasingly demand safety, sustainability, and performance.
  
  

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re not pilot-scale press releases. They’re commercial wins that signal a new industrial transformation powered by biology.

But the wins are scattered. The failures are concentrated. And the patterns are painfully clear.

The Graveyard Isn’t Just Real—It’s Predictable

First Bight Ventures recently published the Biomanufacturing Graveyard Report, a deep dive into why so many industrial biotech companies fail. The headline is grim but unsurprising: brilliant science + weak industrial strategy is a recipe for disaster.

Most companies didn’t die because biology didn’t work.
They died because the world around the biology wasn’t ready.

Patterns emerged:

• Scale-up timelines and costs were wildly underestimated. Founders built 50L dreams for 500,000L realities.
  
  
• Customer pull was weak.  Many biomanufacturers chased tech-first products instead of solving a screaming, paid problem.
  
  
• Value-chain partners weren’t aligned. Brands wanted samples; manufacturers wanted minimum volumes; investors wanted margins that didn’t yet exist.
  
  
• The downstream side—purification, formulation, regulatory pathways—was treated like an afterthought.
  
  
• Fermentation capacity remains limited, expensive, and geographically bottlenecked, while demand for climate-positive ingredients is rising.
  
  

In short: We’ve been building companies, not industries.

Industrial Biotech Needs a New Playbook

Here’s the truth that investors, founders, and strategics are finally starting to acknowledge: scaling biology is not a science problem. It’s an infrastructure and coordination problem.

Biomanufacturing is a team sport. And for decades, we’ve been acting like it’s tennis.

Three shifts will define the next decade:

1. From solo founders to orchestrated ecosystems

We need matchmaking—not between people, but between innovators, CPG brands, contract manufacturers, feedstock providers, formulators, and investors. The winners will be those who build value-chain syndicates before scale-up, not after.

2. From “we invented a molecule” to “we solved an economic problem”

Products must hit real price points using available equipment and realistic bioprocesses. Sustainability is a bonus; unit economics are the business.

3. From capacity scarcity to modular, distributed biomanufacturing

The U.S. in particular must invest in flexible fermentation and bioprocessing assets—allowing companies to move faster, pilot smarter, and derisk earlier. Europe and China are already ahead here.

The Future: Biology as a Climate Engine

The next wave of industrial biotechnology won’t be defined by moonshot molecules.  It will be defined by biological solutions that plug into existing value chains and replace fossil-derived ingredients at scale.

Imagine:

• Fat-slimming lipids for personal care made from waste feedstocks
• Heat-resistant, low-cost biopolymers for packaging
• Healthy fragrances, colors, surfactants, and actives produced with near-zero emissions
• Regionally distributed micro-biorefineries serving CPG, fashion, and agriculture

This is not science fiction—it’s already happening in pieces. The challenge now is connecting those pieces into a functioning global system.

Biomanufacturing Needs Its Manhattan Project Moment

Industrial biotech can be the climate engine of the 21st century. But to get there, we need coordination at a scale our industry has never attempted:

• Shared infrastructure
• Shared risk
• Shared incentives
• Shared learning

If we do that, biology won’t just compete with petrochemicals—it will outperform them.

And we’ll finally move from graveyards to growth.