This blog is where we share stories, announcements, and insights from around the iGEM community.
All in iGEM Startups
Cyrille Pauthenier is the CEO and Co-founder of Abolis Biotechnologies, a firm based in Paris that focuses on industrial biotechnology and advancing sustainable bioproduction through microbial fermentation and strain engineering.
Meet Manuel Rozas, an emblematic figure in Chile's scientific innovation ecosystem. As the founder of Kura Biotech, he has positioned his company as one of the pioneers in biotechnological enzyme production in Latin America, transforming his passion for science into a global enterprise that sells to the world's leading toxicology laboratories.
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.
Every year, iGEM startups is dedicated to supporting aspiring BioFounders to explore entrepreneurship, and bridge the gap between ideas and impact within synthetic biology projects. Through the Venture Foundry program, our aim is to engage with scientists and introduce concepts of entrepreneurship and commercialisation in a research-driven context.
One of the standout startups in this year’s VCL 2025 Cohort comes from TU Munich (Technical University of Munich): Lucas Mair and Magdalena Lang, two medical school students who are using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to tackle one of the industry’s biggest pain points: inefficient lab workflows. Through their startup, Provigen.AI, they’re not only streamlining experimental processes, but also showing how the next generation of student biofounders is thinking, building, and scaling a biotech startup.
My name is Shumvobi Mitra and I am currently both a high school student and the founder of RhizeUP, a startup based in Maryland in the United States. I first got involved with iGEM in 2023 with the iGEM Team East Coast BioCrew. What started as a competition project has now grown into RhizeUP, a startup tackling fertilizer runoff and supporting sustainable agriculture.
Every year, the iGEM Startups Summer School brings together iGEM teams from across the globe for two days of workshops, panel discussions, case studies and networking. This year, we were joined by 251 participants belonging to 110 iGEM teams (Figure 1).
This was a great opportunity for aspiring 2025 iGEM teams to explore their entrepreneurial potential and the possibility of winning the Best Entrepreneurship Prize at the iGEM Competition!
Meet Shumvobi Mitra, a high school founder of RhizeUP based in Maryland, in the United States. She began her journey with iGEM Team East Coast BioCrew 2023, engineering rhizobia bacteria to combat fertilizer runoff and protect waterways. After the iGEM Competition, she joined the 2024 iGEM Startups Venture Foundry Program to officially launch RhizeUP.
For many iGEMers, the competition is more than just a project showcase, it’s a launchpad to the next step in their synthetic biology journey. The people you meet, the roles you take on and the networks you build can take you into the many corners of the field, including the startup ecosystem.
At the 2024 iGEM Grand Jamboree, we caught up with Adrian Romberg, formerly working in Product Management at xyna.bio, a startup based in Mainz, Germany, focused on making powerful computation tools and bioinformatics intuitive and accessible.
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.
Jonty Corrin started his career in academia as a bioscientist, but his entrepreneurial journey began during his final year of undergraduate work. While his first startup didn’t thrive, it sparked a passion for early-stage startups and their growth. Along the way, he connected with Nucleate UK, a student-led, nonprofit organization that helps early-stage biotech founders translate academic research into real-world startups with dynamic support.
Stephanie Michelsen, founder and CEO of Jellatech, started her journey as a student participating at the iGEM Competition in 2018 with the University of Copenhagen. Fast forward to 2021, she founded Jellatech, a biotech startup producing high-value human proteins using synthetic biology, based in the United States.
Gregory Segala, CSO and co-founder of FluoSphera, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Toulouse and continued as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Geneva, where his passion for cell research laid the foundation for his entrepreneurial journey.
What if you could work on your iGEM project while simultaneously exploring its entrepreneurial potential? For iGEM Aachen 2024, this was no hypothetical question—they embraced the challenge of preparing their project for the iGEM Competition while exploring its commercialization potential through the iGEM Startups program at the same time.
As a pre-accelerator, iGEM Startups guides iGEMers in exploring, validating, and bringing their SynBio ideas to market. In 2024, the Venture Foundry Program has been a pivotal step for 300+ iGEMers, supporting them in evolving their scientific concepts into startups.
Meet Eric Herrera, the co-founder and CEO of Maverick Biometals, a finalist in the 2022 iGEM Startup Showcase in 2022 and Y Combinator S22 Cohort. Eric shared his remarkable entrepreneurship journey, starting with a single bench in a Baltimore basement to a 10,000 sq. ft. biotechnology laboratory. With a team of scientists from over 10 countries, Maverick Biometals is pioneering the production of lithium batteries and silicon semiconductors entirely through biological methods
2024 has been an incredible year for iGEM Startups, marked by notable funding trends among iGEM Alumni startups, particularly at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology (SynBio) within our ecosystem. This year alone, seven alumni startups have secured over $95 million in funding—from government grants to multimillion-dollar investments—highlighting the scalability and market potential of these groundbreaking technologies.
Exploring the sector of iGEM Startups 2024. We'd like to identify the key fields of our iGEM Startups Cohort and how this is implicated in the current emerging trends in synthetic biology to understand the evolving bioentrepreneurship landscape.
Ashwin Jainarayanan is a biofounder with a deep-rooted passion for advancing medical science through synthetic biology and immuno-oncology. Ashwin's journey of founding Granza Bio began during his PhD at the University of Oxford, when a serendipitous email mix-up connected him with Ashwin Nandakumar, who was working on another project at a nearby department.
