First comprehensive and free database of global biomanufacturing capacity announced

Synonym, which in October announced a US$6.3 million pre-seed round raise, has joined forces with The Good Food Institute, Blue Horizon and Material Innovation Initiative to launch 'Capacitor' – the first comprehensive and free database of microbial fermentation facilities worldwide.

The company has suggested the goal with Capacitor is to promote the growth of biomanufacturing by making it easier for synthetic biology companies to find the production resources they need to bring more bioproducts to market.

Companies that need fermentation capacity can now search Capacitor’s growing list of facilities to find and connect with ones that meet their needs. Users can refine searches by location, scale, bioprocess, feedstock and more. They can also browse facilities on an interactive map of the world.

There’s a fast growing ecosystem of companies using biology to produce the things we consume – from the food we eat to the materials we use to the energy powering our world. These new bioproducts require far fewer carbon resources than products made with chemical synthesis or animal-agriculture and as a result, have the potential to create a more sustainable manufacturing economy.

The Boston Consulting Group and Blue Horizon highlighted the biomanufacturing capacity bottleneck in a recent study. They found demand for fermentation-based, alternative food proteins will surpass 15 million metric tons by 2030. Whereas, experts estimate there are only ~10 million liters (not tons) of capacity currently available to meet that demand. This means we need at least x1,000 more microbial fermentation capacity to keep up with future demand. And this doesn’t even account for the capacity needed to manufacture non-food bioproducts!

Building new fermentation capacity will take time and Synonym is working quickly to solve that problem. In parallel, the company also wants to find solutions that promote biomanufacturing right now. That’s why it has developed and is releasing Capacitor.

From talking with the synbio community, it became clear that finding technical details about existing fermentation capacity was more difficult than it should be. Facility listings were only available in disparate databases, which made finding viable production partners time-intensive and expensive. It’s a pain point for the industry, so the team behind the company went out and aggregated all the key facility specs into a single directory that is now easily searchable for free.

At launch, Capacitor offers details on more than 100 facilities globally. Synonym will continue to add details to existing listings, as well as add new facilities to the platform and hope to ultimately create the most comprehensive database of available capacity in the market.

Capacitor’s initial scope is focused on microbial fermentation, which represents one of the most mature and standardized biomanufacturing processes. However, in a press release, the company stated that it will keep a close eye on broader industry trends and hope to expand scope in the future as other bioprocesses, such as cultivation, as we move toward to commercial scale.