Pow.bio says biomanufacturing is broken and its continuous fermentation tech will fix it

Its no secret that alternative protein companies and others leveraging fermentation technology have an issue scaling to commercial production. All of that is predicated on having biology technology working.While companies like No Meat Factory, Planetary and Prolific Machines raised capital to build production facilities, Hall said the solution to the scaling problem wont come from building large-scale bioreactors, even if the funding comes from the government.The real true story here is that most of the biology design stuff just is too damn expensive to take to the market, Hall added. Building bigger bioreactors doesnt make that better, and as a result, what you see made are things you either need very tiny amounts of, like the heme protein in the Impossible Burger, or things that are crazy expensive, like lactoferrin, or human collagen, which is also nice to have alternatives.She explained that prototyping, a necessary step in synthetic biology production, is where the time and cost factor come into play. For example, involving a six-month wait and $50,000 investment each time.Pow.bio intends to bring down biomanufacturing costs by unlocking the potential of synthetic biology via a broader palette of wins, that involves the reimagining of fermentation facility operations, Hall said.And thats what Pow.bio is doing: Building more efficient bioreactor capacity through its continuous fermentation technology. Anchoring the technology is artificial intelligence-controlled software called SOFe that is designed to accelerate process optimization and drive autonomous operation.Simply put, Pow.bios hardware and software combination has the capability to allow for a steady pace of inputs and outputs that is 5x faster for a fraction of traditional capital expenses, Hall said.Let us be your rapid prototyping partner, she added.