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Allozymes raises $15M for its accelerated enzymatics & ML model
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SOSV Team
SOSV Team
May 29, 2024

Finding the correct enzyme can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. Allozymes employs a proprietary microfluidics technology to build the next generation enzyme engineering platform. Its platform can build and test millions of enzymes per day, boosting the likelihood of success by 200x in developing the most effective enzymes.

The company is also incorporating AI into its dataset.

“CEO and founder Peyman Salehian told Tech Crunch: “There’s no machine learning model in the world that can tell you exactly what to do, because the data we have is so little, and so fragmented; we’re talking 300 samples a day for 20 years,” a number Allozymes’ machines can easily surpass in a single day.

So, Allozymes is actively developing a machine learning model based on the data they have. “We fed the data to the machine learning model, and it came back with a new molecule suggestion that we are already testing,” Salehian said—a validation of the approach.

Allozymes has attracted customers across a number of industries:

  • Phytoene is an enzyme found naturally in tomatoes and ordinarily harvested in tiny quantities from the skins of millions of them. Allozymes found a pathway to make the same chemical in a bioreactor, using 99% less water.
  • Bisabolol is another useful chemical found naturally in the candeia tree, an Amazon-native plant that has been driven to endangered status. Now a bio-identical bisabolol can be produced in any quantity using a bioreactor and the company’s enzymatic pathway.
  • Fibers of plants and fruits like bananas can be turned into a substance called “soluble sweet fiber,” an alternative to other sugars and sweeteners; Allozymes got a million-dollar grant to accelerate this less-than-easy process. Allozymes has made cookies and bubble tea with the results.

Allozymes “enzymes-as-a-service” is called called SingZyme (single enzyme), and will continue to be an entry-level option, filling the “we want to do this 100x faster or cheaper” use case, per TechCrunch. A more expansive service called MultiZyme will take a higher-level approach, discovering or refining multiple enzymes.

Since 2021, the company has grown to 32 people in the U.S., Europe and Singapore, and has 15x the lab space.

The $15 million round includes new investors Seventure Partners, NUS Technology Holdings, Thia Ventures and ID Capital, with repeat investment from Xora Innovation, SOSV, Entrepreneur First and Transpose Platform

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