Climate CEOs (formerly Entrepreneurs for Impact): Scaling Climate Tech Startups VC-Backed Bacteria Domestication: MicroByre’s Mission to Replace Petrochemicals with Renewable Biomass
Dr. Sarah Richardson shares how MicroByre is “taming germs” to unlock scalable biomanufacturing, replacing petrochemicals with lawn clippings—backed by Prime Impact, MCJ Collective, and Earthshot Ventures.
⭐ My guest today is Sarah Richardson, co-founder and CEO of MicroByre.
MicroByre makes pets out of bacteria. They domesticate naturally occurring bacteria and introduce them to industry. They enable customers to efficiently produce bio-derived chemistries at or below current petrochemical economics. Newly cooperative bacteria can replace ancient biomass (petrochemicals) with renewable biomass (lawn clippings) efficiently and economically.
They’re backed by leading climate tech investors such as Prime Impact Fund, MCJ Collective, and Earthshot Ventures.
Sarah has a PhD in Human Genetics and Molecular Biology from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and was a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow of Genomics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory she worked on massive-scale synthetic biology projects and the integration of computational genomics with experimental genomics.
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🎙️ In this episode, we talked about:
- What it means to be a germ wrangler
- How they are bringing about biomanufacturing at scale
- The 95% of bacteria we don’t yet understand and the potential that represents to tackle humanity’s greatest problems
- Why it’s important to learn how to learn
- The role of luck vs. skill in growing a company
- How she overcame the challenges of raising VC capital
- Why they’ve assembled a team of microbiologists, chemists, molecular biologists, data scientists, and computer scientists to automate the collection and curation of bacterial data.
- And lots more
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🙏 Hope you enjoy it!
📣 And give Sarah and MicroByre a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people.
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