Lygos

Sustainable chemicals without petroleum.

Our target products are the specialty chemicals of today that can grow into the commodity chemicals of tomorrow. The primary hurdles restricting market growth of these chemicals is their current high production cost or environmentally hazardous production process. We address both these problems using a low-cost microbial fermentation technology, enabling over $25B in downstream value to be unlocked using our technology.

We make our products using commercially proven, acid-tolerant yeast. We have developed a suite of high-throughput engineering technologies that enable us to rapidly prototype and optimize our microbes, enabling low-cost, rapid technology scaleup.

Many of our target products are organic acids, compounds that are expensive to synthesize using petrochemistry but can be produced at high theoretical yield microbially. A high yielding process means less sugar is required to produce each kilogram of product, decreasing operating costs and lowering exposure to changing raw material (e.g., corn) prices. For some compounds, a theoretical yield greater than 100% can be achieved by sinking carbon dioxide. Low operating costs is a fundamental reason why microbial production of organic acids (e.g., itaconic, lactic, citric, and succinic acids) has been more successful than biofuels (e.g., farnesane, bio-diesel, butanol, and ethanol).