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This blog is where we share stories, announcements, and insights from around the iGEM community.
This blog is where we share stories, announcements, and insights from around the iGEM community.
All in iGEM Startups
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.
On March 27–29, the 2026 edition of the iGEM Startups BioHackathon brought together 330 participants across 30 teams for a weekend of ideation, collaboration and pitching.
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.
