Best Startup
The cooperative Dutch Bank, a top 50 bank globally, invested in Triplebar as part of Rabobank’s commitment to contribute to a future-proof food system.
Triplebar’s Hyper-Throughput™ screening platform acts as a “microprocessor for biology,” integrating hardware, software, biology, and biochemistry to miniaturize and accelerate evolution.
Triplebar and its commercial partners use the platform to develop biological systems for manufacturing low-cost, low-footprint animal proteins to replace traditional animal sources partially, improving the performance of animal cell lines for cellular meat products, and discovering novel therapeutic biologic drug candidates for addressing major human health challenges.
Triplebar’s technology can access and assess 10,000 times more biological samples than any other platform. Its platform is designed to test and screen tens of millions of molecules and measure the effect of billions of mutations daily, speeding up the discovery of solutions to our carbon crisis and diseases.
“There is a need for diversification in the supply of proteins and other animal-derived ingredients, but alternative methods like precision fermentation and cell-based production costs are too high,” said Daniëlla Vellinga of Rabobank Investments.
“Triplebar’s technology has the unique potential to bring costs down, helping both startups and incumbents commercialize sustainable products. We look forward to a long-term collaboration with Triplebar’s world-class team,” Vellinga added.
Synthesis Capital, a prominent investor in early-stage food system companies, led Triplebar’s most recent funding round. Essential Capital, Stray Dog Capital, and iSelect Fund also participated.
Triplebar is a foundry business of The Production Board (TPB), a venture established to solve the most fundamental problems affecting our planet. TPB, the first and major investor in Triplebar and a participant in the latest round, is re-engineering global production systems across food, agriculture, biomanufacturing, human health, and the broader life sciences.
“We set out to find the right partners who share our vision and mission to support the biotech and food tech sectors to solve the food security, healthcare, and environmental issues the world faces today by continuing to speed up innovation,” said Triplebar CEO Maria Cho.
“Triplebar has figured out the critical combination of testing assays and biological organisms and the ability to screen orders of magnitude greater throughput than any other company, so we can look at more things and all the while generate the billions of biological data sets needed to train AI algorithms to enable ML to unlock the genotype-phenotype link design space of relevant organisms,” Cho added.
“For genuinely disruptive adoption to occur, alternative products must at least match animal-based proteins on taste, price, convenience, and nutrition,” Synthesis Capital Partner and Co-Founder Rosie Wardle said. “We believe Triplebar’s technology platform has the potential to bring entire portfolios of bioproducts to market, helping a wide range of companies, from incumbents to startups, to scale up production while reducing cost.”
Scaling the vision
The latest investment round of at least $20M comes after several years of growth for Triplebar, named for the mathematics symbol of identity or equivalence; the company makes bio-identical proteins to those found in nature.
In early 2023, Triplebar partnered with cultivated seafood platform company Umami Bioworks to co-develop optimized cell lines suitable for large-scale production of cultivated seafood – starting with one of the most popular and critically endangered fish species: Japanese eel.
Together, Triplebar and Umami teams will work to improve the fitness and performance of cell lines to enable lower-cost, more efficient production of cultivated foods. Umami Bioworks will leverage Triplebar’s Hyper-Throughput™ screening platform for solution discovery, testing millions of potential phenotypic solutions in the time it normally takes to search mere hundreds. The partners will work together to accelerate cell line development and optimization without the need for genetic modification.
Triplebar announced a partnership in January 2023 with global ingredients giant FrieslandCampina to co-develop and scale up the production of ingredients essential to human nutrition.
Together, Triplebar and FrieslandCampina will produce microbial cells via fermentation methodologies – which, at scale, can produce proteins with a much smaller land, water, and energy footprint than traditional livestock.
