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Checkerspot is a materials innovation company. Advances in our understanding of biology, chemistry and materials science are converging with breakthroughs in data science and unleashing capabilities they once only imagined. Checkerspot's technology unlocks this potential, expands the palette of materials available to product designers and enables a more intentional way to design performance materials for specific applications. As a graduate of the Illumina Accelerator program, we are building a technology platform that enables the design – at a molecular level – of new materials. Through applications development, they prototype and iterate on specific product embodiments. By engaging directly with product users and partnering with socially responsible corporations, they design and bring to market superior products with better materials.

The world they live in is built from petroleum. The paints on their walls, the carpets in their homes, the tires on their cars, the plastics for everyday consumer goods – these and many more products are made from chemicals that are mostly made from petroleum, creating a $3 trillion/yr industry. To fulfill their dependency on petroleum, they do crazy things like setting up oil rigs in the middle of the ocean and drilling several miles into the ocean floor! They’ve done these things because they have had no alternative to meet their needs. Not anymore! Over the past decade, advances in engineering microorganisms have afforded us the opportunity to make the same chemicals that are traditionally made from petroleum. Instead of requiring raw materials buried deep within the earth, microbes can use abundant and renewable sources of carbon such as sugars during processes akin to brewing beer. Despite the numerous advantages, making chemicals this way at the industrial level is still rare. This is because it’s still more expensive than using petroleum for producing the chemicals. Although a few challenges need to be solved to usher in the era of renewable chemicals, a fundamental constraint that limits the economic competitiveness of using microbes is the loss of at least 33% of the carbon as carbon dioxide waste during the fermentation – think of this as the head on your beer. Because of this carbon loss, potential product is simply not made. In technical terms, the maximum achievable yields are 67%. As sugars are the most expensive component of a bioprocess, making the carbon dioxide waste translates to as much as 20% of total costs, which severely hampers the economics of the bioprocess and its competitiveness with petroleum-based production methods. At ZymoChem, they are re-imagining the microbe, one that is designed to eliminate (or substantially reduce) carbon loss during the production of chemicals. To do this, they had to design a completely new biosynthetic pathway – one that doesn’t exist in nature – to make the chemicals. Each individual step of this pathway is designed to not lose carbon as carbon dioxide, enabling their biosynthetic pathway to retain all of the sugar’s carbon into the final chemical product. This carbon conservation allows their approach to have superior theoretical yields, up to 50% better than existing state-of-the-art technology! In turn, their technology has the potential to substantially lower production costs and drastically improve cost-competitiveness for making a variety of chemicals from renewable sources, even at today's oil prices.

Ecovative uses biology to solve fundamental human needs at industrial scales and in consumer applications. Ecovative uses mycelium to grow category defining products ranging from leather like textiles to sustainable packaging to high performance foams for apparel and beauty. Ecovative has been widely recognized for its technical and environmental contributions by organizations like the World Economic Forum and in the media including Wired Magazine, Forbes, and Time.

Developer of carbon dioxide recycling devices designed to turn CO₂ into cost-competitive chemicals and fuels. The company's devices make products from recycled emissions and renewable electrons, enabling industries to reduce the carbon footprint while creating a new revenue stream from waste products.

CellChorus provides comprehensive, dynamic analysis of single cells for biopharmaceutical companies. The company’s TIMING platform applies visual AI to evaluate cell activation, killing and movement as a function of time in order to maximize our understanding of the cellular function, state and phenotype of immuno-oncology and other therapies.

Categorized is a medical technology company that revolutionizes diagnostics using cell mechanics and machine learning. The company was founded in 2013 by Ajay Shah and Dino Di Carlo and is based in San Francisco, California, United States.

EnPlusOne is on a mission to bring RNA and RNA solutions to the world. Its ezRNA synthesis platform is a stepwise innovation that can incorporate a diverse array of nucleotide modifications and promises a manufacturing process that can sustainably deliver therapeutic RNA at commercial scales. In addition to direct RNA synthesis, EnPlusOne's ezRNA platform supports a vast array of RNA solution applications. For more information, please visit www.enplusonebio.com

Canaery is an exciting, early stage neurotech startup that is digitizing the sense of smell to enhance the way we interpret and understand the world around us.

Surf Bio is a preclinical biopharmaceutical company leveraging a breakthrough next-generation surfactant to develop enhanced therapeutic solutions for diabetes, oncology, infectious diseases, gene therapy, and other therapeutic areas.

Phantom Neuro creates a system that will enable lifelike control of robotic orthopedic technologies, such as prosthetic limbs and exoskeletons.

ShiraTronics is in the early stages of developing new innovative therapies to combat debilitating migraine headaches. The company is focused on commercializing novel neuromodulation technologies to treat this large unmet clinical need for patients and physicians. ShiraTronics is the first spinout from NuXcel a global medical device accelerator company.

Immusoft is a biotechnology company that is commercializing technology to program the human immune system by modifying the DNA in immune cells. The core components of Immusoft’s Immune System Programming (ISP) technology was developed in the Baltimore Lab at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and exclusively licensed by Immusoft. The technology instructs a patient’s cells to produce gene-encoded medicines (biologics). Cells that are reprogrammed using ISP become miniature drug factories that are expected to survive in patients for many years. It was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.