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Chemical & Engineering News’ 10 startups to watch: Decibel Bio uses epigenetics to ‘download’ new traits to crops

C&E NEWS – Decibel’s goal is to improve crops without resorting to the years-to-decade-long processes now required to develop new crop varieties. “The world of agriculture is going through a lot of change right now—not just a changing climate but also changing consumer preferences,” Bayer says. “The tools that we have to create new and better crop varieties are really, really powerful, but they’re really slow.”

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Agilent customer story: Zilong Wang and Seokjung Cheong, FutureBio

AGILENT – Learn how FutureBio is building a data-driven platform to design, produce, and commercialize next-generation recyclable materials. Read post

WattUp Energy: Making the world’s highest performing battery

WattUp Energy was featured in a profile for New Energy New York. Read about how co-founders Aaron Garg and Jack Fawdon are using novel lithium-based chemistry to pack batteries with “100% more energy density and 200% more power density than conventional lithium-ion chemistries.” Read post
Root corn spore trapping devices deployed in a corn field

Spraying Fungicide to Protect the Crop in Minnesota

Root Applied Sciences has set up spore capture devices across the southern tier of Minnesota. The company developed its approach while pioneering detection and treatment for diseases that affect grapevines at vineyards. To protect their valuable produce, winemakers were spraying numerous times across a growing season. Root Applied Sciences developed a way of detecting and modeling infection that allowed those growers to cut their application in half. Read post

How one startup is using prebiotics to try and ease the copper shortage

TECHCRUNCH – To scale up its technology, Transition Metal Solutions has raised a $6 million seed round, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The round was led by Transition Ventures with participation from Astor Management AG, Climate Capital, Dolby Family Ventures, Essential Capital, Juniper VC, Kayak Ventures, New Climate Ventures, Possible Ventures, SOSV, and Understorey Ventures. Read post

Transition Metal scales microbe tech for copper recovery

MINING.COM – Transition Biomining, now rebranded as Transition Metal Solutions, has raised an oversubscribed $6 million seed round to scale a chemical approach that activates native microbes to lift copper yields from low-grade sulfide ores without changing mine infrastructure. Read post
Two scientists in white lab coats at the lab bench

Startup makes incredible breakthrough that could solve major problem with plastic: ‘A new technology’

Wang told NBC that the company is hoping to deliver a product in two to three years that would be a more expensive, durable plastic used for furniture or plastic tools, as opposed to a solution for inexpensive plastic bottles, leaving room for other innovators to step in. To sway investors during a time when the U.S. administration appears unwilling to support green initiatives, Wang sees profitability as a key to success. "If we really want to push all these things forward, the profit is most important," Wang concluded in the article. "We hope with a new technology, all the parties involved in this industry, they can make the profit and then people can build the circular economy with a self-motivation." Read post
The Terranova caterpillar-tread robot

How one founder plans to save cities from flooding with terraforming robots

Parts of San Rafael, a city just north of San Francisco, are sinking about half an inch per year. That might not sound like much, but altogether, it has meant that some neighborhoods — like the Canal District that borders the bay — have sunk three feet, placing them at greater risk of flooding from sea-level rise. San Rafael isn’t alone. Cities around the world are threatened by rising sea levels, with 300 million people at risk of routine flooding by 2050. The cost of building seawalls to hold the waters back could top $400 billion in the U.S. alone. A new startup is proposing an alternative: raise the city instead. Read post
Six scientists wearing white lab coats

FutureBio startup to make completely recyclable plastic cost-competitive

Biotech startup FutureBio, the first tenant of UC Berkeley’s Bakar Labs for Energy and Materials, hopes to produce and recycle a new kind of durable, biorenewable plastic at a lower cost than regular plastic. Its plastic is made from green materials, unlike petroleum-based plastic. It can be depolymerized, meaning it can be broken down into its building blocks or monomers and then recombined to make new plastic. This means FutureBio’s plastic is completely recyclable, whereas only small portions of petroleum-based plastic can be reused after it undergoes mechanical recycling. Read post
Six scientists wearing white lab coats

‘We want to change the world:’ Company says it is creating a new kind of plastic

FutureBio is tackling the problem of plastic pollution head-on by creating what its co-founder describes as a new kind of plastic. Different from both the petroleum-based and the biodegradable ones now in use, it is not only durable but also bio-renewable and easier to recycle, said Zilong Wang. “It proposes a different and a novel plastic, which is different from all other kinds of plastic,” he said. Worldwide, only about 9% of today's plastic is actually recycled. Most of the rest, millions of tons, goes to landfills or ends up in the environment. Even the plastic that is recycled is sent to landfills or incinerators after one or two cycles because the quality of the material degrades. Read post

AIMATX Co-Founder Omar Yaghi Shares 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Omar Yaghi, a Jordanian-American chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry today, sharing it with Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University, Japan. The scientists were cited for creating “molecular constructions with large spaces through which gases and other chemicals can flow. These constructions, metal-organic frameworks, can be used to harvest water from desert air, capture carbon dioxide, store toxic gases or catalyze chemical reactions.” Yaghi is the 28th UC Berkeley faculty member to win a Nobel Prize and the fifth winner in the past five years. Yesterday, John Clarke shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 2021, David Card shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, while in 2020, Jennifer Doudna shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Reinhard Genzel shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Read post