Please welcome Caladan, the biotech platform changing synthetic biology and biomanufacturing
Meet Caladan, the latest addition to Lerer Hippeau’s portfolio.
HQ: New York
Founders: Mike Kobida and Rob Jauquet
The problem: The lab tools that are required to edit cells are well established, but the costs associated with scale-up remain prohibitive, preventing many companies from bringing their bio-made products to market. The overwhelming majority of synthetic biology companies that are focused on precision fermentation and cell culture, especially those outside of the pharmaceutical industry, are struggling to meet cost parity with incumbent products. Now that the technology to edit cells is widely known, the focus needs to shift to optimizing production.
Caladan’s solution: Caladan is equipping synthetic biology companies with the hardware and software they need to increase experimentation throughput while also enhancing data aggregation and analysis. The company’s first product, the Caladan 250, is a high throughput benchtop bioreactor system that leverages AI and machine learning to enable efficient iteration and production cycles. The result is a faster optimization process and a reduction in development timelines, all of which translate to cost savings. Caladan’s bioreactors feature an industry-leading suite of sensors at a price point that is half the cost of the industry standard. Their sensor-rich platform is specifically designed to produce standard structured datasets which can be fed into AI and machine learning tools to generate further insights.
Origin story: Mike and Rob first met as undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and kept in touch as they followed their own career paths. Mike served as a mechanical engineer at a number of different startups (most recently at Opentrons, an LH portfolio company), where he worked as a senior product manager. Meanwhile, Rob worked at several companies as a software developer focused on full stack development. Most notably he was a software engineer at Zapier, a software company building workflow automation solutions . As experts in building automation tools across hardware and software, Mike and Rob recognized the challenges faced by synthetic biology companies, which continue to rely on outdated and costly methods to scale up new products. They launched Caladan Bio in 2023 with a mission to help these companies bring products to market faster and at a fraction of the cost.
Why we’re betting on it: Synthetic biology has the ability to solve some of the world’s biggest healthcare problems. Caladan has built a full stack bioreactor at a fraction of the cost of existing solutions, and as a result, is empowering scientists and accelerating breakthroughs in biomanufacturing. The company’s benchtop bioreactor system offers best-in-class end-to-end automation, drastically lowering the barrier to entry, allowing scientists to run more experiments, and exponentially increasing the available insights via automated data collection. Simply put, Caladan is the only solution in the market that offers the suite of end-to-end experiment control, data analysis, and next generation predictive analytics. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be partnering with Mike, Rob, and the Caladan team as they work to revolutionize the synthetic biology benchtop and help make cell editing more widely available to patients in need.
Our take: Leveraging recent advancements in technology to improve access to established science has been a core focus of ours at LH. We believe that most companies who tout their AI credentials will not stand the test of time for the simple reason that they don’t actually address real problems. Caladan, however, is applying AI and machine learning to tackle a serious obstacle facing the synthetic biology world: how to scale cell production so that millions more people can enjoy healthier lives. Now that we know the science works, we need to begin identifying solutions for bringing biomade products to a wider market. Caladan’s mission begins and ends with access. The company has built a critical tool — the Caladan 250 — that will enable countless labs around the country to generate new biomade products in a cost-efficient manner and, in the process, save lives.
Further reading: “Caladan Bio raises $5m seed round to build next generation benchtop bioreactors” via Ag Funder News
