SXSW Startups: Boost Biomes
The Forrest Four-Cast: March 5, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in the Health and Wearable category, which will pitch at 5 pm Sunday, March 10, Boost Biomes is using the powerful social networks among microbes to provide novel, sustainable solutions to feed and heal people everywhere. Its first products seek to reduce the enormous waste in agricultural products due to crop loss to fungal pests in the field and post-harvest.
These address both pre- and post-harvest food security by focusing internally on post-harvest protection of fruits and vegetables. In the U.S., we waste over 50 percent of our produce. The best microbial products are barely effective, and other organic products focus on freshness, not on the specific challenge of fungal rot.
Jamie Bacher, CEO and co-founder, answered some questions about the San Francisco-based company.
What is your competitive advantage?
Our underlying technology gives us a unique insight into microbiome interactions, which competitors cannot achieve. We are confident that these unique insights enable us to assemble superior products. The data on our products so far is exciting and encouraging!
What are your goals for Boost Biomes in 2019?
The main goals we’ll accomplish this year are to generate processes for scale-up and formulation, while carrying out the key next trials and submitting our products for EPA regulatory approval, alongside automating our platform technology.
What are the biggest challenges your team has faced in the process of making your crop threat mitigating products?
So far, we’ve been very pleasantly surprised with the outcomes of our experiments. We had no reason to expect that our product candidates would be generalists (effective against many different kinds of fungal pathogens), but they were. We had no reason to think the products that were targeted for root-based diseases would work against foliar or fruit diseases, but they do. We didn’t expect that they would come close to products currently on the market — but in some cases, they match other bio-based products, and even, in some cases, they match the protection of chemical products.
The biggest challenges have generally been around product development in a biotech product. It’s hard and takes a lot of work. Extending the shelf life of the product has been a challenge; we now know how to sporulate our lead microbes that can be sporulated. We still need to increase the amount of microbe we can produce at any one time via fermentation. There’s a lot left to do!
Microbiomes are critical players in human and animal health. Tell us about your unique approach to identify multi-microbial products that have important commercial roles.
Boost’s core technology has to do with understanding how microbes actually interact with one another in an ecosystem; we determine causative relationships. This is fundamentally a different approach than others, which typically focus on predicting interactions based on correlation data.
The approach is the outcome of twenty-odd years of research in co-founder Adam Arkin’s lab at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley. Adam’s key insight is in how to use a “snapshot” of the population, taken using DNA sequencing, to understand the actual interactions, using lab-manipulated subpopulations.
With an understanding of the causative relationships, we can rationally build multi-microbial products with the products we target.
Boost Biomes is set on improving microbiome function. The first application you and your team are moving into is agriculture. What other areas are on the horizon for Boost Biomes in the future?
While we are focusing internal efforts on crop production, we have had a number of prospective partners approach us to develop the technology to generate products in other areas. It’s almost inevitable at this point that at some point, our partners’ eyes widen as they come to understand how the technology works. Indeed, it’s been encouraging to see how partners think about the breadth of applications of our technology.
How and when did your team come together and please fill us in on any relevant startup experience?
I’ve been in either startups, or large companies working closely with startups, for about a dozen years now. I saw the peak and descent in the biofuels era of biotech, which was incredibly instructive.
One of the key influences for Boost came from that era. About a decade back, I was working at Sapphire Energy, working on making oil from algae. I led a technical team at the time, which generated the first improved strain of algae to go to our scale-up facility.
The company hit a big milestone with our first inoculations of the large, open, artificial ponds growing algae in the New Mexico desert. It was a great accomplishment; the ponds were a beautiful green with algae. And then, one day in March, as spring is coming, we get a desperate call from the field site. “Guys, we came in this morning, and the ponds are all brown!”
We quickly realized what any farmer would have told us. Fungi had come in and destroyed our crop.
With my own technical background in evolution and ecology, I wondered whether we could control the ecosystem to keep the fungi out. The company pursued more traditional methods of crop protection, and successfully eradicated the fungal pathogens. But the idea stayed with me.
Fast-forward nearly a decade, when we met Adam Arkin who had been studying how microbes actually interact. When we saw and understood his technology, the old idea of controlling ecosystems immediately came back to me, and we knew this was a technology and the kind of opportunity we could found a company around.
We were no longer focused on the ecology of algae ponds. Fungi remain a critical challenge for farmers, to the tune of over $60 billion worth of lost agribusiness, over 600 million peoples-worth of food, in just the top five crops annually, worldwide. That’s 60 percent of the people who go hungry!
This is the kind of impact we’re looking to make with Boost, and with our technology.
What do you enjoy most and least about the startup experience?
I both enjoy and hate the need to viciously prioritize. Resources are always far less than what our vision would have us do in the land of plenty. We trade off resources for agility, which I love, and the need to be resourceful. We need to be creative to address challenges. Finally, it’s all about the team. Morale and teamwork are everything.
What’s one piece of advice you wish you’d had that you’d give to others wanting to join the startup journey?
Remember that you know your company best. Take advice, accept input, be humble — but in the end, growth and success are up to you.
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
