When you picture “chemical engineering experts,” do you think of microbes? If you said no, Greentown Houston member Cemvita Factory is here to change your mind. Its team is leveraging the powers of microbes and synthetic biology to fight climate change.
Let’s start simple. A microbe is a microscopic organism that “eats something and produces something,” Cemvita Factory CEO Moji Karimi explains. These are all around us; take yeast, which can consume sugar and make alcohol. Synthetic biology, then, manipulates what the microbes eat and what they produce.
Cemvita Factory applies synthetic biology to decarbonize and reduce the environmental footprint of heavy industries in three ways: capturing CO2 or methane for use as a feedstock, reducing emissions from energy-intensive chemical reactions, and replacing processes that use harmful chemicals.
The company’s key verticals include carbon-negative biomanufacturing, also called carbon capture and utilization (CCU), biomining, and subsurface biomanufacturing. The climate impact? Utilizing one gigaton of CO2 by 2050, according to Cemvita Factory—about 2.5 percent of global emissions.
In the realm of CCU, Cemvita Factory has microbes consume CO2 or methane and make usable end-products, including polymers and chemical intermediates; the company says its microbes can make more than 30 critical molecules. This process not only reduces a customer’s emissions, but also opens up a new revenue stream.
Cemvita Factory’s synthetic biology business model—cleverly coined “microbes-as-a-service”—can replace chemical and energy-intensive processes throughout the mining supply chain, including extraction, impurity removal, and recycling. Its microbes are better at leaching (removing valuable minerals from ore), for example, than the harsh chemicals that are widespread today. They also operate in ambient air, meaning that energy can be saved from processes that usually require high temperature and pressure. Making mineral processing and metal extraction more sustainable is only growing more crucial as the energy transition drives up demand for batteries.
The company’s third key vertical, subsurface biomanufacturing, repurposes aging oil reservoirs into what Karimi calls “subsurface chemical plants” that use CO2 as a feedstock to create useful chemicals. This process gives these refineries a new, climatetech life without adding significant capital investment.
It’s not surprising that Karimi’s company reinvents oil and gas assets and offers a way for these companies to dive into the energy transition—in fact, he started out in the industry himself. He found that life at a big company wasn’t “fast enough or entrepreneurial enough,” and soon joined a startup that showed him the wide-reaching possibilities of synthetic biology. In 2017, he co-founded Cemvita Factory with his sister, Tara Karimi.
“I truly believe that if we are going to solve climate change, we have to work with the industries that are creating the most emissions—they have to change, and the way they change is not by yelling at them,” he says. “It’s by having someone like me, who understands them, sit down with them and come up with solutions to help the industry reinvent how it does things. We need to leverage all the brainpower, all the infrastructure, all the resources that they have, but in this new direction.”
The 35-person company raised its Series A in 2021. What’s up next in 2022? “This year is our growth chapter,” according to Karimi. Cemvita Factory plans to add 25 to 30 new team members by the end of the year and raise a Series B round. Then, he predicts, comes “explosive growth.”
Cemvita Factory joined Greentown Houston in 2020 as an Inaugural Member and was a participant in Year 1 of the Carbon to Value Initiative—a unique partnership among the Urban Future Lab at NYU Tandon, Greentown Labs, and Fraunhofer USA to catalyze the carbontech ecosystem.
“Houston is going through this transformation from being known for oil and gas to being the hub of the energy transition,” Karimi says. “For Greentown to be in Houston in the middle of all of this, and provide this home for entrepreneurs and have corporate partners, potential customers, and investors meet the startups, has been really helpful.”
Want to work with or for Cemvita Factory? Check out its open roles and get in touch!