We build custom products for awesome companies

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We build custom products for awesome companies

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We build custom products for awesome companies

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We build custom products for awesome companies

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros.

We build custom products for awesome companies

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Suspendisse varius enim in eros.

We build custom products for awesome companies

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Next-Gen of Biotech Startups

"We invest in biotech startups", we say when asked what we do at GRIDX. "That's a lot of money and a lot of time, right?", we almost certainly get as a reply from anyone related to the world of venture capital investments. And the answer is no, because there is a new generation of biotech companies.This new generation has a different dynamic. With much less you can know much more about their real chances of functioning. They can reach the market much faster. They need founding teams committed to deeply understanding science but also to understanding the business model. They need these founders to have life projects committed with company projects. And they need to have the ability to take a lot of risk to propose solutions that, in a combination of good science and new business models, present a disruptive and exponential alternative to the market.To try to explain what these new biotechnology companies are, we can start with the definition of biotechnology. Wikipedia says: "Any technological application that uses biological systems and living organisms or their derivatives for the creation or modification of products or processes for specific uses."

The more intuitive idea that biotechnology is just developments that involve a lot of money and a lot of capital for something to reach the market is related to biotechnology that develops new molecules (new drugs) for the pharmaceutical industry. In these cases, it is clearly so: being able to put a new drug on the market takes a lot of time and capital.
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But with this definition of biotechnology, we have many more solutions than just the pharmaceutical industry. The difference that arose in recent years is that biotechnology began a process of democratization. And this happened because technological leaps started to occur. The most significant leap is the decreased cost of genome sequencing. What used to cost $ 100MM less than 20 years ago today costs less than $ 1,000 and Ilumina, the world leading genomic sequencing company, plans to bring the cost of sequencing a human genome to $ 100 by 2023.This process is causing biotechnology to be digitized.

And when something is digitized we enter, thanks to Moore's law, an exponential curve. Added to this digitization are great advances in the development of different technologies such as electronics or microfluidics, which allow interaction between this world of living beings or their parts and their digitization processes. Added to this, CRISPR technology (which allows to identify and edit genes with great simplicity and precision) appears with great power and great controversies, promising many changes in the future.These technological changes lead to the creation of new startups which are proposing major changes in industries where it was previously unthinkable to introduce biotechnology.Alternative proteins, whether based on plants, fungi, yeasts or bacteria such as laboratory ones, the new meats without cows, mayonnaise without eggs, bacon without pigs, milk-free cheeses made from bacteria, egg whites without eggs, among many other alternatives that today give something to talk about in the food industry.

If we talk about agriculture, a large number of solutions also come forward: there is a new agriculture that seeks to replace agrochemicals with biological or natural products, treating crops post-harvest to avoid waste, understanding the microbiota of each soil, developing natural pesticides, biological fertilizers, or new varieties of plants using CRISPR.We will move more and more from a medicine that treats the disease and the symptom to one that is personalized and anticipated, knowing our genome or knowing our microbiota.All this begins to accelerate because more and more companies that develop tools to democratize and accelerate access to biotechnology are born such as Ginkgo Bioworks, Zymergen and Twist Bioscience.These startups are part of a new generation of biotechnology startups that, according to Synbiobeta, in the last 5 years received investments of more than 15 billion dollars.

In all these sectors, there are companies in the GRIDX portfolio that are contributing their vision and are slowly getting into that international conversation.One of the most interesting aspects of these new companies and this new biotechnological approach is that it allows us to project sustainable solutions to the great problems of humanity, in a world where population growth and the decline in poverty are pushing more and more the demand for these types of solutions. Arvind Gupta, founder of Indie Bio, calls it “The Trillion Dollar Opportunity” in reference to the growth of the global economy, which today is USD 100 trillion and will double in the next 25 years. In this scenario, he wonders how we can grow in this way if it is already known that natural resources are no longer sufficient or their exploitation under current modes of production is not tolerable. His proposal and his promise is biotechnology.

From our approach we are convinced that biotechnology can provide sustainable and high-value solutions to many of the problems raised by the UN in the sustainable development goals: fight against hunger, good health, clean water, renewable energy, responsible consumption, fight against climate change, aquatic flora and fauna, terrestrial flora and fauna, among others.

And it is not only a question of sustainability, there is also a great business opportunity: we can create great companies that from birth relate their commercial success to positive impact success.At GRIDX we want to lead this process in Latin America. We know that there is great scientific and business talent that combined can create companies with global impact.