Tierra Biosciences operates an AI-guided, cell-free platform that produces custom proteins from digital sequences and DNA, enabling customers to order proteins online for pharmaceutical, industrial, and agricultural uses. The platform generates cell-free reagents that are combined with customer sequences and robotic workflows to synthesize proteins and feed data back into a closed-loop AI model. Tierra says its model has produced more than 5,000 proteins to date and that the dataset grows with each run, improving predictive performance. The company currently produces milligram quantities for customers and plans to scale to gram-scale production in the next month or two to support pilot programs. Tierra launched the commercial platform about a year ago, rebranded from Synvitrobio (previously raised $2.6M in 2018) and has secured $7.2M in grants from agencies including ARPA-E, NIH, and DARPA. Management added Michael Nemzek as CEO in 2022 and plans to use new funding to expand customers, build AI data-generation capabilities, and hire a commercial team. Tierra Biosciences is commercializing a cell-free manufacturing platform that strips cellular components to run biochemical reactions in vitro, enabling faster design-build-test cycles and high-throughput data collection. The company emphasizes applications in agricultural and biochemical products while also pursuing biopharmaceutical opportunities. Under CEO Zachary Sun and co-founders Richard Murray and George Church, Tierra positions its platform as a way to run reactions without cell walls by isolating ribosomes and supplying defined substrates and DNA. Tierra is working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to develop processes to produce vanillin and mevalonate from biomass and says it has partnerships with Global 2000 companies in the works. The startup rebranded from Synvitrobio to emphasize its natural products and biochemical focus and has taken on $2.6 million in new financing. Tierra’s technology is being pitched as broadly applicable across pesticides, flavorings, pharmaceuticals and energy markets. The company has also received support from government and research funders including DARPA, the NIH, the Department of Energy, Cyclotron Road, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the NSF and the Gates Foundation.

Total raised

$14M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Mar 2024