Genomatica Raises $15M to Build Demo Plant For Sustainable Chemical Production

We’ve been waiting for this one since last summer.

San Diego-based Genomatica is announcing today it has raised $15 million in a Series C venture round led by a new investor, TPG Biotech, to build a demonstration plant to make a common industrial chemical through a renewable technique, and to develop a bigger pipeline of other petrochemical alternatives.

Genomatica’s existing investors, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Alloy Ventures, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, joined in the round with TPG Biotech, which is affiliated with TPG, the global $45 billion investment firm. The company has raised a total of $38.5 million since it was founded in 2000, according to CEO and co-founder Christophe Schilling.

Genomatica, which describes itself as a sustainable chemicals company, uses a fermentation tank filled with sugar and genetically engineered microbes to produce mass quantities of 1, 4 butanediol. Also known as BDO, the hydrocarbon is an intermediate chemical widely used by the petrochemical industry to make plastics, solvents, pharmaceuticals, textiles and automotive components.

When Genomatica said last June it had succeeded in making commercial-grade batches of BDO, Schilling told me that achievement had cleared the way for construction of a small-scale industrial BDO demonstration plant. Now, after nine months, the company has secured the necessary funding to move ahead with those plans. Schilling says the demo plant will be big enough to produce about a ton of BDO a day, although he adds that the company has not yet disclosed where it plans to build the plant. Such a facility would require a 30,000-liter fermentation vessel (about 7,925 gallons) housed in a facility that could be as big as 20,000 square feet.

In a statement released by Genomatica, TPG Biotech principal Patrick McCroskey says, “After careful and rigorous scrutiny of this competitive field, no company is better suited to drive low-cost petro-alternatives into the chemical industry. In short order and through

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.