San Francisco, CA – November 12, 2024 – Today, we’re excited to share that Anthrogen has raised $4 million in funding to accelerate our work on creating low-carbon, affordable chemicals. This funding round, co-led by Regen Ventures and BoxGroup with additional support from Y Combinator, Wayfinder, and angel investors including Paul Graham, marks a significant milestone for our young company.

At Anthrogen, we’re working to create chemicals and fuels that not only lower carbon emissions but also come at a competitive price, all without sacrificing performance. We know that a key barrier to widespread adoption of greener alternatives is cost—too often, environmentally friendly products come with a “green premium.” Our goal is to change that by making carbon-negative chemicals as affordable as their fossil fuel-based counterparts.

Our approach harnesses the natural power of photosynthetic microbes that consume CO2 from the atmosphere and use sunlight to produce valuable chemicals. We’ve designed our platform to optimize these processes using AI-engineered enzymes, allowing us to rapidly enhance the efficiency of each chemical reaction. By engineering our microbes to grow faster than any known photosynthetic organisms, we aim to increase production throughput while keeping costs low.

One of the core challenges of using CO2 as a feedstock is its stability and low concentration in the air, which traditionally makes it difficult to work with. To address this, our AI models help us design customized enzymes that actively capture CO2 and drive it through a shorter, more efficient pathway toward the chemicals we need. The result is a carbon-negative production process that runs primarily on sunlight, requiring minimal external energy—a clear advantage over conventional electrochemical methods, which are often limited by clean energy availability and high electricity demands.

While we are still in the R&D phase, we’re building and refining our systems to achieve high throughput and scalability. We know there’s a long road ahead, but we are committed to keeping cost and scalability at the forefront of our work. We believe that for green chemistry to truly compete, it needs to be affordable and accessible to a global market, especially for industries that are challenging to decarbonize.

This $4 million investment will allow us to expand our research and development efforts, train our AI models, and continue optimizing our enzyme design processes. We are deeply grateful to our investors, partners, and the community of innovators around us who believe in our mission and the potential of sustainable biochemistry.

As we take this next step, we are excited—and a little humbled—by the work still ahead. Thank you to everyone who has supported us on this journey. We’re motivated by the belief that together, we can reshape the industry and create a cleaner, more sustainable world.

Thank you for being part of our journey.

— The Anthrogen Team