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Building tools to scale biomanufacturing and bring biotechnology products to market faster.
Los AngelesFounded 2024
Biotech
🟢 Raising seed — $2.0M target
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Building tools to scale biomanufacturing and bring biotechnology products to market faster.
Saku Biosciences is building tools to scale biomanufacturing. Our technology enables companies to rapidly develop high-performance cell lines that produce proteins, enzymes, and other biological products more efficiently. The company is built around PicoShells, a particle technology that allows scientists to grow and screen millions of individual cells under conditions that closely mimic industrial fermentation. This approach makes it possible to identify the best-performing strains far faster than traditional methods. By accelerating strain engineering and process development, Saku helps biotechnology companies reduce development timelines, lower manufacturing costs, and bring new products to market faster across industries including food, chemicals, and biopharma.
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John Alden
founder
Biomanufacturing can transform industries from food and chemicals to pharmaceuticals, but getting products to market is slowed by the long timelines required to develop high-performing production strains. Cell line development often takes years of iterative engineering and testing, and many strains that perform well in early lab screening fail when scaled to industrial fermentation. This disconnect between laboratory development and real manufacturing conditions forces companies to repeat costly cycles, delaying commercialization and slowing innovation across the bioeconomy.
Released first technical whitepaper demonstrating increased manufacturing output using our platform. Improved fatty acid production in two industrial yeast species by 31% and 47%. Achieved these results in 2 months and $10,000, compared to typical approaches that require 6+ months and $100,000. This validates our ability to rapidly improve production microbes while significantly reducing time and cost.
Signed a $200,000 milestone-based contract with CyanoCapture to enhance insulin production. This represents early commercial validation of our platform in high-value therapeutics and demonstrates customer willingness to pay for improved manufacturing performance.
Secured a $200,000 DOE-funded CRADA with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and ABPDU to enhance fermented fatty acid production as a replacement for palm oil. This provides third-party validation from leading federal labs and demonstrates early traction in sustainable, domestically produced alternatives to global commodity inputs.
Established a partnership with Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to combine Saku’s biological engineering capabilities with RTI’s chemical engineering expertise. This expands our scope beyond biomanufacturing to address broader challenges across chemical manufacturing and enables development of integrated, end-to-end production solutions.
Established a partnership with Growth Curve Bio (GCB), demonstrating strong demand from contract development manufacturing organizations (CDMOs) for integrated microbe engineering capabilities. This enables a full-stack offering from strain development through scale-up, improving customer outcomes and increasing deal flow.