Top Synthetic Biology Startups in 2024

Biotechnology is rewriting life as we know it, from the medicines we take, to the crops we grow, and the household goods that we rely on every day. But moving at the new speed of science requires better technology. Benchling’s mission is to unlock the power of biotechnology. The world’s most innovative biotech companies use Benchling’s R&D Cloud to power the development of breakthrough products.

Ark is developing novel cultivated meat infrastructure to unlock cultivated meat production at scale. We develop massive bioreactors and advanced automation technologies (e.g., digital twins) to enable previously unimaginable scale at a fraction of the cost of legacy solutions.

Synthego’s vision is to turn biology into an information science, with the ultimate goal of dramatically extending the healthy human lifespan. Synthego builds advanced bioinformatics and automated hardware platforms to create next-generation molecular biology tools, starting with full-stack genome engineering. These world-class tools accelerate basic scientific discovery, critical disease cures and novel synthetic biology applications to improve and prolong life.

Synonym is a financing and development platform for essential biomanufacturing infrastructure - we’re building production capacity for synthetic biology companies and creating a new asset class for investors. We provide synbio companies with flexible capacity for microbial fermentation.  We build new biomanufacturing facilities, offering synbio companies access to dedicated, scalable capacity for minimal upfront capital investment. We accelerate project timelines and minimize internal complexity by handling facility development activities, from site selection through commissioning. We provide capital markets partners with curated access to biomanufacturing infrastructure investments, an emerging asset class and we manage these investments on behalf of investors, with an emphasis on risk management and maximizing returns.

Volta Labs was spun out of MIT in 2018 with the simple mission of building biological automation from the ground up. Volta is in the proximity of Kendall Square, known as "the most innovative square mile on the planet". Being part of the open biotech culture in Kendall Square made us realize that today’s biologists are held back by the limitations of existing automation tools. With DNA sequencing in particular, we observed that the advances in DNA readout technologies had moved further along than the advances in the upstream steps of preparing samples for sequencing (sample prep). ‍ What started out as a simple printed circuit board to manipulate colored droplets at the MIT Media Lab during co-founder Udayan Umapathi’s graduate work was quickly directed toward solving the “sample prep bottleneck”. The company raised Seed Funding from top VCs in 2019 and later that year added Will Langford as a co-founder and Head of Engineering. ‍ Since then, we have been heads down in the lab inventing and building novel fluidic and sample manipulation technologies. We take an anti-disciplinary approach to solve very hard problems and weave together instrumentation, fluidics, software, biology and chemistry. While our current focus is on sequencing sample prep, we envision a new approach where a single universal machine automates most biological workflows in genomics, proteomics and synthetic biology.

Nodes Advisors is a Zurich-based Corporate finance Life Science firm that work with vital but underfunded companies at the intersection of bio & technology. Our team is made up of entrepreneurs, engineers, product managers, researchers and venture capitalists who share a passion for accelerating the adoption of cutting edge technologies in Biology.

CANCER FUND is a community of individuals investing together to support the development and commercialization of promising cancer innovations with the potential to help patients, survivors, previvors, and the people that care for them. Learn more or join us at cancerfund.com.