From Idea to Impact: Highlights from the 2025 Venture Creation Lab
The 2025 Venture Creation Lab (VCL), held from April 21st to May 16th, hosted by iGEM Startups, brought together aspiring biotech entrepreneurs from around the world to take their first concrete steps toward building a synthetic biology startup. Following the momentum of the BioHackathon, the VCL provided a four-week program designed to turn early ideas into viable venture concepts through lectures, workshops and personalized mentorship.
““We started the VCL as a group of strangers who had just won the BioHackathon together, and by the end we had become genuinely good friends. It was a mix of learning, problem-solving, and having fun. Everyone brought different strengths, and that made working together really enjoyable.””
The four-week program was carefully designed to balance flexibility with structure, and included pre-recorded lectures, live sessions with workshops, office hours and deliverables submissions.
A total of 85 teams participated in the 2025 VCL, with the top 50 teams earning a spot to pitch at Demo Day. The teams included participants from all iGEM Startup regions: the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific. They showcased projects across synthetic biology sectors from diagnostics, bioinformatics, biomanufacturing and space biology. The diversity of teams enriched the experience and led to truly innovative collaborations.
Figure 1| Distribution of participants by region.
Figure 2| Distribution of 2025 VCL teams, by sector.
Highlights of the VCL:
Flexible schedule: The Venture Creation Lab 2025 was held virtually and ran across three time zones in parallel, making it accessible to an international cohort. 99% of participants said that they liked the fact that lectures were pre-recorded because they could watch at their own pace.
““The structure of the sessions themselves worked really well, it was not too intense by having five one-hour sessions a week, but deliverables made sure accountability was still maintained. It was a perfect balance.””
Interactive workshops: Workshops focused on one theme each week, highlighting different aspects of the development process. Participants rated workshops an average of 4 out of 5, and described them as a great support in fine-tuning their progress.
““The workshop encouraged us to reflect more deeply and helped us refocus on the business and communication aspects of our project, which was very useful.” ”
Speaker sessions: Receiving a 5 out of 5 rating from the VCL participants, speaker sessions were considered as the most valuable sessions of the VCL.
““We gave the speaker sessions 5 stars because they were extremely helpful. The session on raising capital was especially helpful - learning about the differences between funding stages gave us a clearer understanding of where we stand and what to prioritize moving forward. It made the complex world of fundraising feel much more approachable.””
Figure 3| 2025 VCL Highlights. Participants rated workshops and speaker sessions highly, with 99% praising the flexibility of pre-recorded, self-paced lectures.
Demo-Day Touchdown:
During Demo Day, founders showed their final pitches to a panel of judges and fellow participants. A major congratulations to all our winners:
AMERICAS:
Community Impact Award: AureoBos
Most Innovative Solution: Agropip
Best Presentation Award: ErythrO2
Best Participation Award: BioGlass
Judge's Choice Room 1: PomBio
Judge's Choice Room 2: Skalia
Runner-Up: Helixicore
Grand Prize Winner: Agrinova
APAC:
Community Impact Award: PETal
Most Innovative Solution: TRINITY
Best Presentation Award: Starstead
Best Participation Award: RUVEAO
Judge’s Choice Award: PhageSense
Runner-Up: Edge Science
Grand Prize Winner: Reverra Therapeutics
EMEA:
Community Impact award: VitroZymes
Most innovative solution: RepurOmixAI
Best Presentation Award: EndostiX
Best Participation Award: NeuraNova and NivoCell
Judge’s Choice Award: LIQSENS and VitroZymes
Runner-up: EndostiX
Grand Prize Winner: Synbio Catalyst
Many thanks to the panel of judges (EMEA: Belfu Berkol, Cindy Wei and Camila Gaspar Quinonez. APAC: Niklas Klingel, Dario Zebčević and Amy Kao. Americas: Nimi Vashi, Lucas Penny, Jean Ge and Sebastián Hernández).
Participant Takeaways from the VCL:
The Venture Creation Lab is an accessible program which enables you to learn about the world of bio-entrepreneurship while also growing as a founder and a team. The organisation team at iGEM Startups values inclusivity and interdisciplinarity, bringing together passionate problem-solvers from all over the world with the common goal of leading innovation in synthetic biology. A big thank you goes out to everyone who made this event possible, including all the judges, panel speakers and the entire iGEM Startups team!
Figure 4| VCL impact tree chart summarising participants’ key takeaways from this year’s event.
What’s Next?
Forty-three teams from the 2025 VCL have already committed to continuing their journey via the iGEM Startups Mentorship Program, where founders will be paired with mentors based on their specific needs or regions, to continue to develop their pitches.
The top 15 startups will go on to showcase their startups at the iGEM Grand Jamboree’s Startups Showcase, taking place in Paris this October 28-31.
Get your tickets at the 2025 iGEM Grand Jamboree - jamboree.igem.org/2025/tickets
Interested in joining next year’s VCL? Sign up to our mailing list to stay up to date!
