Celebrating the Next Generation of Biofounders: Highlights from the 2025 Startup Showcase
A total of 45 teams participated in the Venture Foundry Program, alongside 25 teams in the 2025 Fast-Track Program and 24 kiosks showcased at the BioInnovation Fair. This year marked a milestone for our Startup Showcase, featuring a cohort rich in innovation and global talent. Many teams have already filed or are in the process of filing patents. A total of over $200K in funding has been secured. Teams represented regions from across the world.
This year, over 800 scientists from around the globe engaged with our Venture Foundry Program. The year also brought a dynamic series of panel discussions exploring investment opportunities, SynBio entrepreneurship, startup building, and intellectual property. These sessions helped chart a clear path for scientists to bring their ideas from the laboratory to the marketplace.
Celebrating Innovation at the BioInnovation Fair
The year concluded with the BioInnovation Fair, which included the Startup Showcase with our top 15 startups, and the announcement of the 2025 Startup Showcase winners.
Pomegranate Biomanufacturing (United States), co-founded by Kenzo Salazar and Arif Ansari, won the Grand Prize at the 2025 Startup Showcase. This startup is pioneering the biomanufacturing of volatile enzymes, making previously challenging processes possible.
Congratulations to the runners-up!
Synfera (United States) focuses on the recombinant expression of erythrocruorin, a hemoglobin-based oxygen carrier, to help address the global blood shortage.
Averra (United States) empowers farmers with data-driven diagnostics and a comprehensive platform that makes climate-smart, regenerative agriculture accessible, scalable and economically viable.
“Starting this company as undergraduates, we always had a bit of doubt. But coming here and realizing how excited people are about our company and what we are doing in the technology we’re developing. I think this is really going to be a motivator for us to get back into the lab, keep working, and hopefully make our vision of a world with synthetic blood substitutes a reality.”
- Si Chen Pan, Co-founder of Synfera.
2025 Startup Showcase Judging panel (from left: Patrick Torbey, John Cumber, Nadege Grabowski and Rebecca Godfrey).
Huge thanks to our judging panel: Patrick Torbey (Neoplants), John Cumbers (SynBioBeta), Nadege Grabowski (Da Vinci Labs), and Rebecca Godfrey (ExpressionEdits Ltd).
Patrick Torbey, CEO and founder of Neoplants, a startup engineering plants to have a positive impact on the world, starting with indoor air quality and climate change, shared his insights:
“It’s very interesting to see the transition from iGEM teams to a real startup and this is kind of a pivotal point, where you see the teams shift from an academic mindset to a business mindset and you see people at different stages of this transition. So, it’s very interesting to see it.” - Patrick Torbey
Patrick Torbey also shared his advice for aspiring biofounders:
“I think the best advice anybody can give is go for it. You will never be ready to go into the startup world. You will always learn as you go. So, if you have a passion for something, for a problem, go for it as soon as possible and find the challenges and try to overcome the challenges. That’s number one.
“Number two, never fall in love with your solution. You fall in love with a problem that you want to solve, not a solution that you want to push. If your mindset is ‘this is a problem I want to solve, and whatever the solution is, I’m going to find it,’ that’s how you overcome the problem and the challenge. But if you try to fit your solution, your technology into one or another problem, it never really works.”
iGEM Startups supports the next generation of biofounders in navigating a path from project concept to startup-ready solutions.
The Venture Creation Lab (VCL) is iGEM Startups flagship program. Join us for an intensive four-week crash course designed to guide scientists through the venture creation process. It will run in three different regions and will begin in April of 2026.
We asked our startup teams why they joined the Venture Foundry Program:
“I’m a scientist, and when I first joined our company, I had no idea what I was doing, honestly. The company changed so much since joining the Venture Foundry, just because of the amount of help and really just the amount of business knowledge that I was able to learn from there. So really, turning an iGEM project from an idea to a capitalizable technology, you need some sort of incubator or some sort of help, and VCL is a great way to have that.” - Kenzo Salazar, Co-founder of Pomegranate Biomanufacturing
“I’m a scientist, and when I first joined our company, I had no idea what I was doing, honestly. The company changed so much since joining the Venture Foundry, just because of the amount of help and really just the amount of business knowledge that I was able to learn from there. So really, turning an iGEM project from an idea to a capitalizable technology, you need some sort of incubator or some sort of help, and VCL is a great way to have that.” - Kenzo Salazar, Co-founder of Pomegranate Biomanufacturing
“Coming from an iGEM team, it (the Venture Foundry Program) was a really great way to get a better understanding of who our users really are and the types of challenges that we could tackle with our technology, take it outside the lab, and have a meaningful impact!” - Trinity Olander, Co-founder of Averra
Apply now as a Biofounder: igem-all,typeform.com/Biofounder26
Access our iGEM Startups 2025 Annual Report!
Our Annual Report reflects our ongoing mission to empower the next generation of biofounders. Inside, you’ll find highlights from the Venture Creation Lab, sector distribution across our 2025 cohort, emerging trends in synthetic biology and success stories from our alumni.
Download the report: https://igem-all.typeform.com/AnnualReport25
