The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pumping $3.5 million into C16 Biosciences, the Y Combinator-backed firm fermenting options to the environmentally damaging palm oil enterprise. The Gates grant comes alongside a $1 million verify from Elemental Excelerator, a nonprofit accelerator that backs local weather tech “with deep community impact.”
You’ll find palm oil just about in all places — in soaps and biofuels in addition to goodies and instantaneous ramen. Whereas the business’s given itself something of a makeover these days, deforestation linked to palm oil manufacturing is once again on the rise.
Utilizing yeast and agriculturally derived feedstocks, C16 already brews an alternative choice to the seed oil to be used in magnificence merchandise, underneath the identify Palmless.
With the brand new funds, the startup will develop new oil recipes to be used in meals, using each “waste stream feedstocks and non-agriculturally derived feedstocks,” C16 co-founder and CEO Shara Ticku advised TechCrunch. “To expand on the latter,” the co-founder added in an intriguing hypothetical, “this may include utilizing feedstocks derived directly from carbon capture.”
Deforestation is a local weather downside. A 2020 study discovered that local weather air pollution from palm oil plantations alone equate to about half that of the whole aviation industry. Extra broadly, deforestation is accountable for practically a 3rd of all carbon dioxide emissions since 1850, based on MIT ecologist Jerry Melillo.
Along with the Gates Basis and Elemental, C16’s earlier traders embody Invoice Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and DCVC. C16 tells TechCrunch that it’s raised $36.3 million in fairness funding to this point, in addition to $2 million in grant funding through the Division of Power and Agile BioFoundry.
