When biology began to produce our world

The Past of the future

In 2019, Arvind Gupta posted something on his personal blog that is worth revisiting today: an article titled, with deliberate ambition, “The $100 Trillion Opportunity.” It was a thesis that at the time seemed so exaggerated that it sounded implausible: that life-based technologies would be the next major disruption in production. That they were the key technological platform for solving not only health challenges or those posed by climate change, but practically every productive and economic sector on our planet.

But Gupta wasn’t just putting his idea into words. He had also been giving his all into it for four years with IndieBio, the accelerator he had co-founded with Sean O’Sullivan precisely to pursue that thesis.

Of course I resonated with that text. How could I not? What’s more, I was fortunate enough to discuss it with him a few months later, when he visited us in Argentina as the keynote speaker at Bio Argentina 2019. That’s when I realized it was exactly the same quest we’d been on at GRIDX since we started in 2016—but in both cases, it went back even further. In those earlier years, we had seen the same thing he saw and were pursuing the same drive he was pursuing and articulating so clearly in his post: building an organization to bring about the next major productive disruption based on life based technologies. I also remember being thrilled to see that Beeflow (a company from our Batch 1—the first cohort of startups, the very first pilot of what we are today) was mentioned in that same text as an example, as a small piece of that future yet to be built.

While the future horizon Gupta envisions in his text is around 2040 (and it will definitely be worth revisiting that text in ten years), I feel enough time has passed now to say that his thesis, our thesis—that insight that biology is the disruptive technology upon which we will build our next productive system—has matured well. With a few hiccups, but well. A few years have passed since the hype train started rolling, and it’s time to assess how we’re doing on this journey.

After the hype

About seven or eight years ago, the “bio for everything” thesis was at its peak. And that momentum had far-reaching effects. It drove the growth of alternative proteins (led by Impossible and Beyond) and accelerated the cultured meat industry. It spurred the development of CRISPR-based therapies. It helped Pivot Bio reach unicorn status with the promise of replacing synthetic fertilizers with microbes. Bolt Threads attracted Stella McCartney and Adidas with its promise of replacing leather with fungi. And, perhaps as a synthesis of that entire era, Ginkgo Bioworks and Zymergen went public.

But then, the biotech sector, which seemed destined for limitless growth, hit a roadblock. It even took a slight step backward. The world turned upside down, and in just eight years we witnessed a paradigm shift that completely transformed the landscape of opportunities:

A pandemic. Growing geopolitical tensions in a less globalized world, leading to the need for a productive matrix with fewer critical points. Unprecedented pressures on healthcare systems, where an aging population meets an epidemic of chronic diseases. An environmental landscape that has expanded beyond climate change to include the biodiversity crisis, soil depletion, water scarcity, and other planetary boundaries. The cost of sequencing a human genome falling below USD 100. The Nobel Prize for AlphaFold. The Nobel Prize for CRISPR. And an artificial intelligence revolution that found extremely fertile ground in digitalized biology.

Against that backdrop, the industry didn’t explode—that’s true—but far from shrinking, it grew stronger. Once the initial hype had faded, the underlying technologies continued to improve steadily, the ecosystem kept growing, and the foundations for a bio transition became increasingly solid. The transition became increasingly necessary. Increasingly inevitable.

I write these words having lived through—and even survived—those turbulent times, and confident that there are still more challenges ahead. At GridX, we’ve been building in the bio sector from Latin America for ten years; we have nearly a hundred startups in our portfolio, and we can’t help but see signs that didn’t exist before. Today, I don’t think we need to revise that initial biotech thesis from a decade ago, but rather build on it and, at the same time, renew it. What we felt a decade ago as a kind of call from the future, the whole world is now beginning to see.

After working with startups in biopharma, precision fermentation, bio-based materials, biofertilizers, computational biology, healthcare, biomanufacturing, and many other ways of applying biology as both a product and a process, at GridX we have access to something rare: an intimate and naturalistic perspective on a diverse ecosystem that both encompasses and transcends us. A living network of startups, funds, universities, government actors, and bio professionals that has gradually taken shape and which, I dare say, confirms much more clearly than it did ten years ago that biology is not just another sector. It is a new technological stack capable of reshaping how we produce.

Food, medicine, construction materials, solvents, cosmetics… the bioindustry can produce it all. It can transform not only products but also the production processes themselves by designing proteins, organisms, soils— biobased processes of all kinds. Because the planet needs it, yes, but above all because humanity and our economy need it. 

The need and the promise

The pressure on planetary boundaries has ceased to be an ethical warning and has become a tangible constraint on production. Scaling up the current production system even further without fundamentally changing it is incompatible with what the planet can metabolize. It simply isn’t enough. And that makes disruption essential.

The fragility of a material system based on petrochemicals has gone from being a risk to a reality that is reshaping industries and geopolitics. What was once a distant prospect of the need for change has become a concrete urgency: shortages of synthetic fertilizers leading to lower food production, disrupted supply chains that will take years to recover, and shortages of essential inputs that are already making headlines.

Added to this is the demographic factor. Year after year, we witness a bigger demand for innovation in health, nutrition, prevention, and care in a world with increasingly aging populations—and in some countries, such as the United States, with a decline in overall health, as six out of ten people suffer from chronic diseases according to the MAHA report. Current systems cannot provide these on the necessary scale.

The pressure—the demand—is palpable. The good news is that supply has also matured.

The promised technological convergence is being fulfilled—I would even go so far as to say it’s exceeding expectations: AI applied to biology, synthesis and sequencing costs falling by orders of magnitude, and fermentation and biomanufacturing platforms maturing and scaling up. The time between scientific discovery and a product reaching the market has shortened. Not at the speed of software, but much faster than it was ten years ago.

We, as investors, have also improved. The entire bio-investment ecosystem has improved. Today, we have a better understanding of what a founder needs, what makes a team succeed, and the pace at which we can expect a company to mature. We don’t understand it perfectly, and we can’t predict it with exact precision, but we certainly understand it better than we did yesterday, and we’ll understand it even better tomorrow.

All of that—geopolitical pressure, an aging population, and convergence—means that biology is no longer a speculative venture in technological terms. It is a promise that is turning real every day. 

However, there is one question we must ask aloud: Is the available venture capital system properly designed to finance this ecosystem in a way that meets this needs?

A VC tailored to this ecosystem

The VC model we know was built for the digital age. Bits that replicate at zero cost, network effects that rapidly concentrate value, a winner that takes almost everything within five to seven years and displaces long-established industries to build a new empire on top of them: advertising, commerce, finance, logistics, hospitality, and travel. That logic leads to a single insight: seek out the natural monopoly. One hundred companies are launched, following an extremely steep power law, with one or two massive successes and 98 failures as the natural expectation for the portfolio.

These new bio based companies do not rule out the possibility of such enormous successes (our own portfolio includes companies with every potential to become category-defining platforms). But having watched this ecosystem grow, we are now witnessing something else. Something that is not common in the digital model: companies that solve difficult problems and have real value precisely because the problem they solved is difficult. A process, an organism, a solution that no one else has: that’s valuable, even if it isn’t the dominant platform. And when that solution is so specific, it makes sense to integrate it into the production chain through the large companies that already dominate the last mile, bringing capabilities that those companies cannot—and will not be able to—develop on their own.

This is particularly relevant now that disruption in artificial intelligence—especially agent-based AI—shows that purely digital products are unlikely to have lasting defensibility. Organizing bits is easier than organizing atoms. Materiality is one of the few areas where it is still possible to create a unique capability and scale it up.

Perhaps the point isn’t to come up with a new name for a company worth 100 or 200 million, but rather to build an ecosystem where ten companies worth 100 million each solve problems that no one else can solve. The startup industry has already invented too many animals to list the exceptions: unicorns, camels, zebras. These are all attempts to use metaphors to domesticate a reality that is often much simpler: there are companies that are valuable because they solved something that previously couldn’t be solved.

In bio, that something usually has a physical form. A microorganism, an enzyme, a formulation, a production platform, an interface with a hospital, industrial plant, or with a buyer who needs to replace a molecule, improve a food product, produce differently, reduce risk, or build resilience. That doesn’t always lead to perfect monopolies. It creates capabilities. And when a productive transition begins, scarce capabilities become valuable.

This new business model calls for a different kind of founding team. First, we are convinced that scientists must be at the heart of the business and view this company as their life’s work—a project to which they devote their mind, body, and spirit to transform an academic scientific career into an entrepreneurial scientific career. Without science, this is impossible, but science alone is not enough. From the very beginning, we believed it was essential for this science to be complemented by the experience and energy of business professionals—entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs. In this way, science and business work together to maximize impact.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve been very fortunate to meet these entrepreneurs who have moved beyond their academic projects and taken the leap into starting a company. They are bold and talented business professionals who have accepted the challenge of leading scientific companies.

This generation also envisioned a different kind of company than the ones we’ve come to know in the digital age: companies that develop technologies for others to incorporate into their value chains. For the most part, these are companies that do not seek to displace traditional industries but rather to work alongside those who developed a global supply chain model yet lack the technologies to create a system that is compatible with life. 

Fail fast vs Don’t die is more than a slogan, it is a framework for this new entrepreneurial profile that finds the great opportunity to differentiate itself and succeed in finding the way for science to impact the real world by building value along the way in its intellectual property, teams and development capabilities.

That’s why perhaps the right question isn’t just how much a bio company might be worth, but also what network of companies, knowledge, infrastructure, capital, and demand can effectively give rise to a new productive matrix. What kind of capital understands the timing of living systems? What kind of organization supports founders without overshadowing them? What kind of ecosystem allows some companies to scale as platforms and many others to proliferate as critical components of a new stack?

That’s the conversation we want to start.

We don’t have the perfect answer. We have something better: ten years of experiences, insights, mistakes, companies, founders, questions, and lessons learned. And we have a ten-year plan moving forward that proves our commitment. 

Finally, everything we want to do, we want to do it here. From Latin America to the world. Because for many people in this community, developing a new life-centered production system is—forgive the redundancy—a life’s work. I see it every day in my team, among the founders, among colleagues, among a growing number of scientists at organizations dedicated to science and development, and among an increasing number of investors and large companies that are reaching out and want to be part of it.

Did I say “finally”? I should have said “at the beginning.” This online space was born out of the need to organize what we’ve learned, share it with those who are building this transition, and bring greater visibility to an intuition that is no longer just a distant promise: biology as a way of shaping the world. So here we go—we’ll be sharing everything we’ve learned along the way.