Anthrogen 🧪 Scalable, carbon-negative polymer manufacturing

tl;dr We are engineering photosynthesizing bacteria and cascading their enzymatic outputs for low-cost, scalable, and carbon-negative polymer manufacturing. We want to take in tons of CO2 to help reverse climate change while also working to decarbonize supply chains, so carbon capture becomes redundant in the first place.

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Hey everyone! We’re Connor, Vignesh, and Ankit – the cofounders of Anthrogen (formerly Arctic Capture). This is actually our second Launch YC post of the batch (first one here under the name Arctic Capture) – we decided we needed a relaunch/rebrand.

In our first launch we promised carbon capture with genetically engineered bacteria. In this one, we are happy to tell you that we have exceeded what we originally thought was possible at the beginning of the summer; we’re not just focused on bacterial carbon capture but also on recombinant protein expression and generative protein models – all coming together under a single unified platform.

Polymers are everywhere, we are not very good at creating them sustainably. Current carbon dioxide removal technologies are expensive and/or inefficient.

From plastics to fuels to foods to fabrics to carbon stores – every facet of our lives is defined by polymers. Publicly traded companies live and die by the prices of these carbon chains and with the price of crude oil, inefficient catalytic processes, looming threats of legislation/public pressure around carbon emissions, these companies worth trillions of dollars are in a precarious position. We need a way to produce polymers cheaper, sustainably. Solugen became a $2b startup in 5 years by using sugar instead of oil as a base of these reactions – is there another source of carbon we can use instead?

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies are also prohibitively expensive – current high-quality solutions still cost >$1000 per ton of CO2 capture. With more than two-thirds of the Fortune 500 pledging net-zero goals in the next decade, a cost-efficient solution to decarbonization is worth billions.

Our solution?

We are creating a platform that allows for both CDR and low-cost polymer manufacturing while sidestepping traditional roadblocks of scaling up bacterial cultures using generative models and CRISPR.

We’ve figured out a way to make the most productive cyanobacterial species (cyanobacteria were the organisms behind the Great Oxidation Event ~2bn years ago) grow even faster – to the best of our knowledge, going through the literature on the topic, we have created the fastest photosynthesizing organism alive. We have also determined chemoenzymatic processes from the cyanobacteria’s enzyme output that can create starch from carbon dioxide. We are starting with starch as the quintessential polymer but hope to have a process that is generalizable enough to reapply to other more valuable polymers down the line.

Fig 1: Some of our bacteria! These are all engineered strains to various degrees – with one of the more promising ones on the left (the deeper the green, the better the growth).

We have a self-sufficient team.

Ankit Singhal was a Science Research Fellow and Named Scholar of Columbia University. He has worked in both wet labs and computational labs (focusing on catalysis and structural biology) for years. He published several first-author papers even in high school and won and led national teams at international science/research competitions. He’s ready to lead Anthrogen’s damp lab approach as CEO.

Connor Lee was the youngest-ever Columbia Robotics president and a researcher at the ROAM lab at Columbia. He has over 10 years of experience building robots and tinkering—he placed 3rd internationally for FRC and top 5 internationally for MATE ROV. As Anthrogen's CTO, he is instrumental in designing the systems hardware approach for autonomous cell harvesting, filtration, high-throughput enzyme cascading, etc.

Vignesh Karthik performed ML/geology research at the Naval Research Laboratory and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia’s Earth Institute. His work in sediment analysis translates well into bacterial culture movement prediction (important for optimizing growth rate and conditions). He is also working on parallelizing and automating the system design along with all the geological work related to carbon storage as Anthrogen’s COO.

Fig 2: Office hours with PG!

We’d love to talk to:

• Synthetic biologists.
• Anyone interested in offsetting their carbon emissions.
• Those looking for a platform for analytical-grade recombinant protein expression.
• You! Even if it’s just to say hi, we love to yap.

Feel free to email us or send us an intro if you can at founders@anthrogen.com.