 It's really exciting to have you here to speak about an emerging category of companies that you're building at the intersection of tech and biology with a very big ambition to transform large traditional industries like food and chemicals and make our world more sustainable in the process. So let's kick it off with some introductions. Inia, would you like to start? Sure. Thank you, Irina. Thanks to everyone for being interested in hearing what we have to say today. I'm Inia, as was pointed out, co-founder and CSO at New Culture, and at New Culture we are making real cow cheese without a cow. Why are we obsessed with cheese? I want to tell you a little bit about why we're so hardworking on solving the cheese problem. You might be aware that animal agriculture is one of the key contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, nearly 14 percent. What you might not know is that of all food products we consume, cheese is in the top three most damaging products to the environment. Just after beef and lamb, cheese is third in greenhouse gas emissions equivalents and land use, and cheese is the worst product in the world of all food in terms of water needed per kilogram of product. You're really leaving ethics aside. If you wanted to eat more sustainably, you would move beef and cheese out of your plates and chicken, fish or egg are actually much less damaging. What makes this much worse is that while plant-based foods have had massive innovation in the last 20 years, cheese hasn't been disrupted. I don't know if any of you eat vegan cheese here, but there simply is no great plant-based cheese of today. Plant-based cheeses don't work. They don't work because they don't contain the key molecule that only us mammals make, the casein protein. Casein is this magic ingredient that's basically turned from milk into cheese and makes cheese cheesy. It gives the melt, the stretch, the functionality, everything we love about cheese. So, at New Culture, we're basically building technologies to manufacture, to produce these dairy proteins, the real bio-identical dairy proteins, caseins, and not only that, but make the product, make the cheese, turn them into best cheeses in the world, which are more sustainable, healthy and nutritious, don't have lactose, don't have cholesterol, antibiotics, trace hormones, and really make the new cheese experience, as we call it. To do that, we are firstly utilizing fermentation to produce our casein protein. When we make that casein protein, we use processes to harvest it and purify it out of this fermentation mixture. When we come out with a pure casein, we use it together with other plant-based ingredients to formulate the cheeses. Just to touch briefly on where we are today and what exciting things we're doing, we have sold for nearly all of the challenges in our R&D, in our dev and tech side. We actually just raised our Series A of $25 million, and are looking to, in our Series A, come to commercial manufacturing. We see this as a move from being a biotech company to a food company, an exciting food brand, in just two years' time, actually. We've had over 50 people this year taste our cheese on pizza. We're working with some really exciting chefs and pizzerias to actually bring it to consumers already in the next year for trying, and then in 2023 to the market. Congratulations, amazing. Grant, would you like to tell us a little bit about Fabric Nano? Yeah, thanks, Irina. Hi, everyone. Grant here, you know, Fabric Nano. We founded the company about three years ago, in 2018-2019. I'm going to give you three key things here. You know, what stage our company's at and why it's exciting to be in bio right now, why we think it's exciting, what we do as a company, and then what we think is the vision for our technology in the future. So, our company, three years old, we're about 20 people. We started out actually building a lab under a highway, believe it or not, in London. You can do that. And that's how it feels. It feels like we're scientists in a lab. It feels like we're building microprocessors in someone's garage. It really does feel like a revolution is taking place. Over the last two years, we worked on R&D. We got a lot of things moving. And then we took Atomico's Series A round. Just recently, we built a really nice new lab in central London. We're recruiting from Cambridge, Oxford, you know, central London, of course. But we really think it's an awesome talent pool for the company. And moving forward to what we do, get to that, our company is trying to use biology to make chemicals. And we're not using the traditional approach of working with yeast or other microbes, which have loads of problems in them. We're actually focused on trying to work in this new paradigm, this new thing called cell-free. It's where you take the exact same components that are inside of yeast. You take proteins like A, B, and C. And you're going to use those proteins A, B, and C to do chemistry, but you're not going to use a microbe. And we think this is awesome. We think that this allows us to make chemicals that were previously untouchable by traditional biomanufacturing approaches. And we saw this in the early 2000s with the Clean Tech Revolution. Companies went after commodity chemicals. You know, you saw Amorous try to go after biofuels. And it all failed because they were using microbes like yeast. So what is our vision of the future? Our vision is to make those $2 trillion worth of commodity chemicals that microbes have failed to make so far. And we think we can do this, and the way we're going to do this is we're going to enable the chemical manufacturing industry by giving them these proteins A, B, and C that they can use in their standard packed bed flow reactors, these traditional pieces of equipment that they already use today, we're going to enable them to start making new commodity chemicals using this new technology. And we're really excited that all of the elements, all of the tools are in place for us to really deliver this in the next year or two. That's actually a great segue to speaking a little bit about the market and the broader space of the industries you're playing in. What's the potential here? What's the vision case? And more importantly, why is now the right time to be building a business in the space? What has happened? Why wasn't that possible five, 10 years ago? Yeah, I can take this one. I think a lot of things have happened in the last 10 years. Biology has become much better understood, and it's become really an engineering problem. It's no longer using genetics to try to force microbes to do certain things. It's looking at the actual biology from a first principles approach, looking at the components that do the chemistry, and actually kind of mitigating all that scale up risk by moving away from these traditional hosts and these traditional techniques that we grew up with over the last centuries. And so if I want to go into a little bit more detail about the market, the market tried in the very beginning to make these commodity chemicals and you saw companies fail. Today, we have two different types of companies. We have the Ginko BioWorks. These are industrial bio companies trying to make chemicals. Ginko is a company that does a lot of licensing, and then you have companies like Zymergyn and Solugyn. Solugyn will present here at this festival, at this slush. And Ginko is a licensing company. Zymergyn and Solugyn are full-stack vertical integration. And so these companies have kind of struggled to bring products to market because on the one end, companies don't want to take that IP and use it. Companies don't want to necessarily work with Ginko on commodity chemicals. And so you see Solugyn and Zymergyn trying to bring products to market themselves. They go vertical, they go full formulation. What we think is really exciting about this day and age is that cell-free actually can operate somewhere in the middle. It can operate as almost like a consumable. The picks and shovels, if you wish, then enable bio-manufacturing of commodity-scale chemicals. And we think that that's really exciting. The market is going to explode. There's going to be commodity biochemicals everywhere. And it's going to change the world for the better. And now would you like to talk a little bit about the food world? Sure. And I would like to preface with talking about bio in general from the point of view of what Grant actually has covered here already, developments that have happened and enabled revolution. But there are two things that are relevant to FUTAC in particular is that we have witnessed very big sustainability and climate issues from many technologies we're using and just from the way we live. And we have also witnessed a very crazy amount of grassroots and consumer demand for change, which was not the case just 10 years ago. So people are asking for better ways of doing things. And so I think it's really, I do dare to say it's a century of biology and we are witnessing revolution, how we eat, how we cure disease, how we bio-manufacture, it's changing now. Future is now. And some examples that are out of food that I'm really impressed with are the technologies that are, for example, revitalizing soil by deploying microbial communities to do so, technologies that are producing personalized immunotherapies. And you know, just technologies like ours, like food where we see in the U.S. impossible burger that has bio-engineered hemoglobin protein sold in all fast foods across the U.S. So it's just amazing to witness that within the food. And what we call particularly cellular agriculture might not be termed everyone knows, literally means producing food from cells. Therefore, first happened the plant-based revolution. There is a lot of innovation in plant-based world for the last 20 years. You know, if you remember from your younger days, if you were eating plant-based products that were mainly soy-based, that's all you could find. Today you'll find any protein type, any product you want, any replacement even for animal product. And people call it alternative protein. I wish one day we called it just protein. And plant-based has disrupted, you know, burgers, sausages, a lot of foods, milk, 15% of fluid milk today is plant-based, consumed. But again, cheese and certain categories have not been disrupted because plant-based ingredients can't provide that functionality. So people came up with thinking, what if we can make bio-identical products? And really the person who revolutionized this idea was Mark Post in 2013 in the Netherlands where he made the first lab-grown, back then was called lab-grown burger that cost at $300,000. And it was kind of cool, but science fiction idea. And I just want to fast forward to today. We have over 100 venture-backed companies in cultivated meat and dairy and egg space. And the cost came down 1000X to, you know, under $300 per that burger, which is still expensive and far from where we need to be, but just shows what's happened in just seven years' time, actually. So sometimes we humans are impatient and think that's, you know, a long time. But even on our lifetime, that's actually just the craziest revolution happening and fastest change that could be happening. So I'm very excited to be part of this cellular agriculture space. And in dairy and in eggs, actually, if you're in the U.S. again, you can buy products on the market, bio-identical dairy and egg proteins. You can buy them. And we see that there is such a demand that supply can't meet it, actually. So, yeah, it's just a very exciting time to be in a food tech. Yeah, and to kind of... Makes me think about the point that we tend to underestimate long-term and overestimate short-term progress. Were you gonna say something? Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, what's really helping our space to move forward is the demand from the end customer. I think that, you know, this didn't exist two years ago the way it does today. The example I was giving with Ginkgo Bioworks and then these other companies like Zymergyn and Solygen, they all struggled to get that uptake because people didn't wanna take the risk. Now the chemical companies are turning around and saying, actually, we're being forced to take this opportunity. We're being forced to use new technology to try to integrate it. And so that only started happening in the last two years. We've seen customers coming to us saying, our board of directors says, we need to cut our GHG emissions 50% in the next 10 years. We need some technology like yours. Can we please try to use it? I don't think that the companies that came before us in this bio revolution and this industrial bio revolution, they didn't have that luxury. And I think that right now is a really great time to be kind of funneling this technology into the marketplace because the market's accepting it for the first time. And so it's really an exciting time not only because the technology is at a state of development, but because it's married with the demand side of the customer saying, we're really forced to do this at this point. It's a really strong pull. And speaking of acceptance, I'd like to change gears a little bit towards the investor world and their sentiment and their acceptance of technologies like that. From where I sit, I still hear a lot of skepticism or concerns about the space around the R&D risk, around capital required to build these businesses, around time to market, which makes a lot of tech investors kind of shy away from these categories. Exactly. What has been your perception and how do you think about the opportunity in terms of more investor angle? Can I take that one first, do you mind? Of course. So I think the perfect example of where this happened in the past is with Intel. Like a great book you should read as the documentary of how Intel was built inside Intel. One of our investors gave that to us and it was a great book for me to read in the beginning of the company. And if you read this book and you read the history of Intel, you see that it is a hardware company through and through. Everyone knows Intel makes these chips, but actually the biggest innovation they made very early on was just making wafers that didn't crack as much as every other fab. So how do you make wafers long enough and get the production volumes up? It's a hardware problem, but the investors who took that risk, Warren Buffett, for instance, and other investors that people probably don't know were involved in Intel that early, they had the best return of this entry. Intel is one of those companies that you wish you saw was enabling, the tech was enabling the entire computer revolution, the entire internet revolution, all of these technologies, these devices. Intel was behind it all and that company made a killing. It was a hardware company and I'm telling you that Bio is about to see 20x the number of companies in volume and these companies will be 10 times larger than Intel is. And how can I say that with confidence? How can I possibly get up here and be like, we're all gonna be 10 times the size of Intel? Well, the market says that it's just 10 times to 100 times bigger, right? Intel was carving out a new market. Even today, the computer market is nothing compared to the chemicals market. It's nothing compared to these industrial markets. And so if you think about what biology has right now, it has the tech. It has the insane market cap that it can attack. It has the demand from the consumer side and the investors are still a little slow to inject money into companies that will look 10 times larger than Intel with a very good frequency of hitting a good one. And I think that that is something that we really need to change in the future is kind of articulating that this vision is going to pan out and it will be a very, very big return for a lot of people and a big return for the environment and the world which is an incredibly aligned mission. Yeah, would you like to share your view from? I have to say, I resonate with Grant and I would say that if we were on this panel 15 years ago, we would probably be addressing skepticism of fully electric cars and solar and we see what's happening. And what I would also like to separate is two things here. One is, to me, the bullish nature of investments in bio and in food tech in my field concretely. And second is, which is a question that I think we can debate and I'm interested always thinking is whether even with billions of dollars in investment we can actually completely remove animal agriculture out of plate and actually disrupt the mass market. That's kind of something that we're discussing. But to the first point, I would actually challenge that challenge that there is that skepticism because what we are witnessing in the last few years has just been incredible and to give some numbers out there, biotechnology as a whole has been just the last year, $30 billion worth investment market bigger than FinTech, many people just don't notice, and food, food tech has raised over $3 billion just last year, so 10% of that. And as a comparison, in last 10 years, in last decade, food tech raised $6 billion. So we basically did half of that in just last year. This is field that's growing exponentially and there's a ton of investor interest actually. People are just really excited and I think there is a challenge definitely for both us educating and investors learning about what it actually means and what are the challenges that we have to face and they have to take with us and that has to be communicated really well. To address the actual question, I think was about skepticism on the cost, for example, and technology failing. Example that Grant gave and a lot of examples actually in biology or in biotech have shown that we have developed technologies in last 20 years that are the enablers. They are the enabling technologies, the pigs and shovels Grant mentioned. One example is of course the cost of genome sequencing, the ability to edit a genome today at cost of gene synthesis actually really critical when we moved to silicon chips to actually do gene synthesis, we reduced cost 10x and now we pay about 9 cents per base pair. It's just incredible. That's actually enabling us to synthesize genes, to edit genomes, to edit microbes in a way that we were not able to do before. We can edit microbes just unimaginable way today and for new culture that really meant that we were able to solve for these kind of costs or R&D challenges of the efficiencies of the microbe and the efficiencies of the manufacturing process. And I can say that we already solved for 80% of those challenges and really what's next for us is the scaling which is not trivial, but it's an engineering problem and that is the part where it does require a lot of capital to actually come to manufacturing, producing and selling. Last thing I would say is that investors, I would imagine VCs would look on a 10 year timeline typically to return their fund and if investors are looking on two to five timeline, they're short-sighted and what VCs do best is invest in future or what the proactive and visionary investors do best is invest in future. And I would say that those are actually doing that. They are investing in our field massively. In five years from today, new culture will be selling in over 3,000 restaurants in the US starting to sell in Asia and in Europe. We'll be selling over five billion pounds of our cheese, making over 50 billion revenue. In 10 years time, we will be selling our cheese all over the world. So yeah, I think this falls well within the timeline that the VCs should be interested in and understanding and if they're looking for two to five year timeline then they just need to start thinking differently and start thinking differently for the planet because at the same time we're kind of running out of time. Now is this ideal prime time for us to join forces and to deploy biology in the way that Grant was exactly describing. Yes, and I think like it would be incorrect to say that investors aren't interested in bio. I mean, investors are clearly interested in bio. Investors are interested now in deep tech but these words kind of keep people away from investing in this space. They think of bio as this dangerous thing. They think of deep tech as like a huge, like binary risk, right? But what we are seeing with the tools that have been developed over the last 10 years is very, very clear cost curves. For our company, we deploy protein engineering to stabilize enzymes so that we can use them to produce chemicals. Very simple. Protein engineering, hundreds of companies do it. We pay more money, we stabilize more proteins. We have easy deployment capability as a company and it's that kind of that friction between the investor saying, is there really an easy way for this company to deploy capital and get a lot of compounding returns into the company? And the answer is yes. The tools exist. We don't have to develop all of them. We're not an R&D facility. We're actually just using all the same tools that everyone else is using but we need to spend some money on using those tools to compound value into our company. And so it's that kind of friction. It's the investors not seeing that this is not deep tech. This is not a, you know, like confusing word, like oh bio, I don't know how to work with bio. It's actually a very simple set of tools. We can lay out those tools. We can spend millions of dollars on those tools just like you can spend millions of dollars on ads to drive up revenue in a software company. And we shouldn't be thinking about bio as this cryptic thing. We should be thinking of bio as a vehicle for change. A vehicle that can help the world can have impact. And a vehicle that already has all the machinery and parts in place, it just needs more fuel. It has some fuel. We can get from here to there but we can't drive across the country and we need to be able to drive across the country. We need more fuel in this tank. I do need some more fuel in our tank. For sure, I can, it resonates, right? If you think about, it's about the degree of comfort, right, in various spaces. More than it is about the objective risk. It's the type of risk that people are or not comfortable with. Yeah, do people see that unlocking by funneling more and more effort into a problem with defined tools? And that picture isn't yet clear. Yeah, and I think we need to bring these worlds together, right, historically even investors were separate and kind of like strategies were built differently. And now actually that separation does not make sense anymore. And the playbooks move around, right? So like, if you're a licensing company and our space can go by works licenses, microbes and genetic spines, microbes. Or if you're going full vertical in a chemical space, these are new business models, right? Like these investors that invested in Ginko and invested in SoluGen and Dimrogen. I mean, they're investing in completely new business models that are shaking the fabric of these massive industries. But that's very uncomfortable for VC to say, we're gonna do something new. We're gonna rewrite the playbook. And it's that kind of risk taking behavior that can actually create real value, like exponential Intel like value, Google value. Yeah, and I would also add that this is how I find from interacting with a lot of VCs is that it seems that the software model, even if the back end of it is not software model and the outcomes are much easier understood, biotechnology is harder to grasp in itself. It's a very specialist field. And of course we as founders need to be doing better job collectively in communicating and explaining and bringing that closer. But even when we do, you still see that there's genuine lack of understanding. So I think it's important. I would say to the investors as well, you need to catch up. You need to start learning. If you actually want to also recognize which companies are gonna be successful and which not in the field and how these different technologies are combined and deployed and which makes sense, which don't, it's just biotech is the, as I said, the new revolution. And if we were to think of it in Apple days, I would say that we saw yesterday, iPads and iPhones, they are yet to come in biology. They are really yet to come, so. So we speak a little, speaking about, you know, this new type of companies and this new biology revolution and essentially this world of biology meets tech, because it is so early, it also means that there aren't a lot of playbooks around how you scale and what worked, what didn't. From where you sit, what kind of advice would you have to founders building businesses in this space based on your experience, based on what you've seen with these kind of first generation of companies like Inco, like Xarmergen? Yeah, I think the, would you like to go first? Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, I think for, I'm gonna be a bit focused on food tech again, but probably applies to everything. Number one, I would say is love the product. This is a key mantra, new culture is science is cool, product is cooler. Science is just the enabler of the product and for us to actually bring about meaningful change to people's lives, we have to address a problem that people have in their lives daily and our product needs to make their lives better. So our cheese needs to be a better experience for them to eat, healthier for them and they need to know that by eating our cheese, they're making better choice for humanity and for the planet. So I would say always go with the product in mind and when communicating, because technology again is challenging to communicate, really communicate firstly the product and work backwards from there. Later you've explained how this product is made and why and how wide that's scalable and cost effective, but it really is all about your product fitting, the real need, tangible need. We're making product that you can eat, touch. It's not in the virtual world, it's the real product. That's the number one lesson I would give. Second lesson I would give is don't take anyone's money, be picky as well. Sometimes we as founders feel very stressed and frightened and cornered into finding the investment and are we gonna make it or not and this is challenging. But again, there is actually more money out there now than ever before and it can be easy to say, I just need an investment. I don't think that's good for long term for the company and we are very careful with who we work with, who we pick. So find investors who are, like Irina was saying, who are gonna actually understand the challenges you're gonna face, the timeline you're gonna work on and be there to support you and work with you and not run away or in two years' time ask you, where is the product? And then thirdly with that I would also say, make sure that you sell well your vision, your goal, your product, but that you don't sugarcoat things and that you don't over promise and under deliver. This is really dangerous for our entire field because if there are companies who do that and then don't have product in the market, don't make revenue, IPO and fail, this gives bad press to all of us, puts us all in tough situation, even those who actually are gonna be successful. So the more you can be really positive and visionary and selling on your product and again what you're delivering, what you're solving and how you're gonna get there and be successful, but not a step the line and do things that you actually can't, promise things you can't do, try to stay within those means, within those bounds. The biggest piece of advice I'd give to new founders and also investors interested in bio is just try to understand it, like actually put in the work as you were saying. I think one of the biggest things that you should take away from this talk if nothing else is like, I actually don't have a degree in biology, I'm not a PhD in biology, I was doing a PhD in econometrics and statistics and dropped out of it to do a bio company, shock. And the reason that that's possible is because it really is the application of tools, it's really engineering, it's really understanding what pieces you need at what stage. And I think that people looking to get involved with bio, they should be thinking about business models, they should be thinking about what is a VC-fundable business? In terms of a lot of ideas you see, they're small markets, they're things that don't need VC dollars, they're things that don't need more capital to compound value. And I think that you know, as someone who's come from outside the space, I agree, it's all in the product, but it's all in the trajectory to the product. And it's all in how can you actually deploy money to get to a bigger and better product? And so there are very specific things that you can look at in the space of bio, very specific tools that can be combined in new ways and bring extreme value. And you don't need to be a biologist to see them. And I think that's one of the biggest things. And for any new founder, it's really just that one bit there about it has to be VC-fundable. Like we're talking about trillion dollar companies here. The new age of industrial bio will mint, probably the first trillion dollar company within a few years of its IPO. And that's something that's just never happened for other software companies. And so I think like really start to think about as a new founder, what kind of business actually gets me there? There are plenty of them. The world needs you to make them. So please just start thinking about those interconnections as new founders, as investors, and be conscious of the fact that like money is available, but it has to have a very specific purpose, a very specific tool that uses that money to achieve an end. And I think that there are very, very amazing problems that could be worked on today that people are still not working on. We happen to be working on one. Thank you, Atamako. Thank you so much, both of you. I'm sure you made everyone excited about the potential of biology in some of the industries you're working on. It's been a pleasure to have you here. And thank you. Thank you, Irina. Thank you.