Genomatica and Tate & Lyle Form Strategic Partnership as CEO Explains “Feedstock Strategy”

The past couple of months have been busy for San Diego’s Genomatica, which is announcing a strategic partnership today with Tate & Lyle (LSE: [[ticker:TATE]]), a London-based food and industrial products manufacturer with extensive U.S. operations.

Just two weeks ago, Genomatica revealed it had raised $45 million in venture capital, bringing the company’s total financing to $84 million since inception. One of the key points of the recent round is that Genomatica brought in a couple of strategic investors: Bright Capital is the venture arm of RU-COM group, a diversified Russian business group with investments in industrial engineering and construction management in agriculture and other industries; and Waste Management (NYSE: [[ticker:WM]]), a leading provider of garbage management services in North America. The round also included a new venture investor, VantagePoint Venture Partners of San Bruno, CA, and existing investors Alloy Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and TPG Biotech.

In early February, Genomatica also disclosed a strategic partnership with Waste Management to develop ways of making basic and intermediate industrial chemicals from syngas produced from municipal solid waste.

Now, with the Tate & Lyle strategic partnership, the full scope of Genomatica’s strategy is coming into view. Genomatica CEO Christophe Schilling, said in a recent interview that Tate & Lyle has extensive experience in building and operating “corn wet mills” that are used to make high fructose corn syrup and related industrial starches.

“They have a proven track record in scaling up fermentation processes,” Schilling said. “They also have some direct experience with chemicals that are related to BDO, using a facility in Decatur, IL.”

BDO, the industry shorthand for 1,4-butanediol, is an intermediate industrial chemical used to make spandex, automotive plastics, running shoes, and other products. Major chemical companies use petroleum-based feedstocks to make BDO. But Genomatica showed last year it can make “Bio-BDO,” using genetically engineered microbes and dextrose (from corn syrup) and sucrose (from sugar cane) in 3,000-liter fermentation tanks.

So the strategic partnership with Tate & Lyle represents the

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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.