September 21, 2022

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

Michael Tai, a key team member of Motif FoodWorks who headed up the development and scale up of the key ingredient heme in his role as head of Bioprocess, has left to launch Boston Bioworks – a new startup with the mission to advance fermentation processes and scale-up services to bio-ingredient companies. 

Fermentation technology is booming in food production, but it’s also in a tight spot. Companies leveraging fermentation for the production of alternative proteins raised $1.7 billion in 2021 – reflecting a year-on-year increase of 300 percent with no indications of slowing down.

This sudden influx of capital has been matched by an explosion of startups and innovation, a trend that Boston Consulting Group, among others, are forecasting will rapidly continue. The problem, however, is that bottlenecks are now forming as a result of severe supply shortages in fermentation scale-up expertise and assets. But where there are challenges to resolve, there also exists opportunities.

Until this August, Michael Tai, Ph.D. was gead of Bioprocess at Motif FoodWorks, where he developed the process for industrial production of Motif’s heme ingredient. Now, as c-founder and CEO of Boston Bioworks, Tai is joined by co-founders Mert Sahin, a cell biologist Ph.D. who served as former chief marketing officer within Imaging at GE Healthcare, and Ted Netland, an MIT MBA who was a former analyst at Cambridge Associates, and as director of New Ventures at Lever VC advisors.

Together, the trio launched Boston Bioworks to address the critical bottlenecks they witnessed occurring in the fermentation space of alt protein production by offering a first-of-its-kind platform through which these companies can scale production from benchtop-scale to commercial-scale more quickly and without expensive CapEx requirements.

“We decided to launch Boston Bioworks after experiencing firsthand severe industry bottlenecks for process development and scale-up services, bottlenecks which are costing fermentation companies time and leading to wasted CapEx spending,” said Tai.

The platform will operate via dual channels – enabling companies to produce ingredients from precision fermentation such as meat and dairy proteins, fats, flavorings, etc, – or from biomass fermentation, such as mycelium – to bridge the gap between strain engineering and industrial-scale production.

“We’re strongly encouraged by the enthusiastic market response we’ve already seen for these services,” noted Tai. “Although we’ve just launched the company this month, we’ve already signed four clients from several alternative protein categories and will begin process development and pilot-scale batches for these clients in the coming weeks.”

Being met with such strong interest from the industry, GAI News has been told that Boston Bioworks is currently raising Seed funding to support the company as it strives to meet demand. 

“With the influx of capital into the fermentation sector and the rapid increase in the number of startups and products being developed, there is clearly a need for this scale-up expertise and capacity,” concluded Tai.

~ Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor in chief with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Unconventional Ag. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.

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