Closing the Applications Gap: Checkerspot Closes $5M Seed Financing in Pursuit of High-Performance Biomaterials

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... (C)onsider this venture about Making the Right Stuff — that is, how you translate an entire generation of innovation in digital biology, biobased chemical engineering and advanced fabrication into actual stuff. Or, how you get ASAP to high-value, high-performance applications.

Checkerspot recently emerged from the Illumina Accelerator Program in the Bay Area, and in many ways its a leading example of a technology platform fundamentally built atop the radical transformation of the speed at which we read DNA, a revolution that Illumina has been at the heart of.

That fundamental set of breakthroughs spawned a generation of innovators— some of which built toolkits such as CRISPR (for gene editing), and we’ve seen companies come along such as Twist Biosciences, which sells DNA (including genes and fragments thereof). We’ve seen Inscripta aiming to be the Illumina of writing DNA.

And we’ve seen a generation of companies that originally aimed at fuels and commodity chemicals — Amyris, Gevo, Solazyme — that rose up in the 2000s.

A new generation of companies developing molecules of interest has arisen — built upon the foundation (some would say the ruin) of that first generation of companies. Zymergen and Ginkgo BioWorks building and optimizing production organisms, Bolt Threads building advanced fabrics, Arzeda building innovative cell factories that can transform or supplement current chemical production methods. Think Visolis, and Kiverdi, too.

Checkerspot is built in many ways out of the ashes of Solazyme, and its not coincidental that the two founders are from the Solazyme universe, and that Checkerspot’s initial materials focus has been on materials derived from novel triglycerides from microalgae. That’s Solazyme territory.

It was the cost of the platforms that in many ways dictated a very early focus on commodities, that alone could provide the volume to support the investment levels. And in most cases, the costs did not come down as fast as hoped — tumbling oil prices and lack of attention to incentivizing advanced, high-risk commodities (vs first-gen) didn’t help.

The solution then is two-fold. Find a higher-value class of materials to work on, and take advantage of the proliferation of fundamental technology to reduce the cost and timelines to reach cash positive.

“At Checkerspot we’ve sought out partners, including investors, that think differently, share our passion for innovation and share our mission,” Dimmler told us. The mission? “To create new-to-the-world high performance materials and unique products that also take the environment into account. Existing, converging technologies are unlocking a whole new world of development, allowing us to design with intention and enable better ways of doing things.” READ MORE