Bengaluru biotech startup String Bio raises $20M in Series B round

Biotech startup String Bio on Monday said it raised $20 million in a Series B round from investors, including Ankur Capital, Dare Ventures, Redstart, Zenfold Ventures, and Woodside Energy.

The startup has also inked a deal with Australia's Woodside Energy to produce sustainable protein ingredients from greenhouse gases.

It said the investment will help it drive the market growth of its products and strengthen its decarbonisation efforts.

Founded by Ezhil Subbian and Vinod Kumar in 2012, Bengaluru-based String Bio uses biotechnology to produce animal feed and food ingredients.

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It uses its proprietary SIMP (String Integrated Methane platform) that leverages fermentation technology, chemistry and process engineering, and synthetic biology to produce high-quality next-gen ingredients for animal nutrition, agriculture, human nutrition, and personal care sectors — all manufactured using methane as the raw material.

"We believe String Bio's technology could eventually be used to recycle methane at Woodside facilities. It could also be deployed at third-party sites with available biomethane such as landfill facilities and farms," said Meg O'Neill, CEO, Woodside Energy.

String Bio is the only company in Asia that has enabled a methane-based value chain through biological processes.

Methane is a greenhouse gas that traps around 27 times the amount of heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, and is responsible for a third of global warming. Agriculture and oil and gas industries are the biggest methane gas emitters, according to the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's AR6 report.