This blog is where we share stories, announcements, and insights from around the iGEM community.
All in iGEM Innovation
What started as a question of why there are not more spaces for bold, ambitious builders optimising for solving hard problems became a three-month residency programme for technical founders ready to go all in.
Based in Helsinki, Finland, FR8 defies easy categorisation. Not an accelerator, not an incubator, somewhere between a research lab and a focus retreat where young technical founders live, build, and push each other toward unreasonably ambitious goals.
Cindy Wei is an Associate at Lunar Ventures, a Europe-based pre-seed and seed deep tech fund built on the thesis that technical founders across Europe need technical venture capitalists to partner with them from day zero, before traction, revenue, or market validation. Most recently, Lunar Ventures launched a €50 million Fund II, investing at the intersection of AI and data infrastructure, space, robotics, science + machine learning, and tech bio. Alongside her investment work, Cindy recently completed her PhD study in Bioinformatics at the Charité and Max Delbrück Center in Berlin, where she sits at a rare intersection: actively doing science while funding it.
iGEM Innovation aims to support bioinnovators to turn their innovations into lasting impact. Through the Venture Creation Lab (VCL), early-stage teams are introduced to the practical foundations of building a synthetic biology venture from a research background, covering everything from customer discovery to commercialisation.
Carolina Villa spent a decade scaling bioprocesses in industry: first at DSM, the Dutch multinational known for its fermentation and biotechnology work, then at CJ CheilJedang, a South Korean food and biotechnology company and one of the world's largest producers of fermentation-based bioproducts. She has since moved to the investor side, where she's now a Principal at Nucleus Capital, supporting pre-seed to early-stage deeptech climate startups.
Meet Pedro Lovatt Garcia, Co-Founder and CTO of tera, previously known as Anzen Industries, a cell-free biomanufacturing startup that recently closed its £2.2M pre-seed funding round from leading European venture capital (VC) firms. This fundraise marks a significant milestone for tera as it prepares for its next phase of growth in the United States.
