The Seattle-based Washington Research Foundation supports groundbreaking technology in the life sciences, information technology and physical sciences fields. By advancing brilliant research and early-stage entrepreneurs, we help to grow Washington's technology economy. WRF Capital is the seed fund branch of the Washington Research Foundation. Our mission is to help local companies and institutions manage intellectual property and business. We are one of the leading venture capitalists in the Northwest, and our financial returns are invested back into research and initiatives that support new company spinouts. We help to create a vibrant research and enterprise community.

Washington Research Foundation

The OS Fund finances and supports inventors and scientists who are working on audacious breakthroughs to solve the greatest issues and opportunities facing humanity today. Our mission is to partner with tech pioneers who aim to improve the lives of billions of people around the world for generations to come.  In the same way that computers have operating systems at their core — dictating the way a computer works and serving as a foundation upon which all applications are built — everything in life has an operating system (OS).

OS Fund

Conversion Venture Capital (CVC) is focused on control and growth investments in quality mid-market businesses which would benefit from a long term investment perspective. They invest our own capital and, unlike traditional private equity firms, They do not operate as a fund. As a result, They have greater flexibility with regards to structuring and investment time horizons.   They have expertise investing in multiple industries and subsectors across a variety of business cycles and through various economic conditions.  They strive to be active and value add board members leveraging our experience, ability to assess add-on acquisitions, and network of relationships to build value over time.  They rely on the quality of existing management teams to operate our businesses and endeavor to make the senior executives of each portfolio company our partners in success.

Conversion Ventures

Bioeconomy Capital invests in early-stage companies with the goal of accelerating the biotechnology revolution. Based on its startup operational expertise, product development experience, and globally recognized strategic analysis, it has developed a blueprint for building and deploying technological capabilities that will become a critical infrastructure of the 21st-century economy. The company's proprietary blueprint is the distillation of the fund managers'​ five decades of combined experience in synthetic biology and other engineering fields and cannot be readily duplicated. Prior investments include Zymergen, Riffyn, Synthace, RoosterBio, Arzeda, Bellwether Bio, EdenWorks, and Lumen Biosciences.

Bioeconomy Capital

Sustainable Conversion Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Sun Lakes, AZ.

Sustainable Conversion Ventures

Universal Materials Incubator Co., Ltd. is venture capital firm specializing in materials and chemical industry investments. The firm was established on October, 2015 and is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan

Universal Materials Incubator

Casdin Capital is a fundamental research investment firm focused on the life sciences and healthcare industry. It manages a long-short equity fund and makes investments in early-stage to late-stage private investments.  Casdin was launched in 2012 by founder and CIO Eli Casdin and as of October 2020 has approximately $2.2 billion in assets under management.

Casdin Capital

Conti Ventures is the venture arm of Continental Grain Company.

Conti Ventures

Circulate Capital is an investment management firm dedicated to incubating and financing companies and infrastructure that prevent ocean plastic. They focus on the prevention of mismanaged plastic waste in countries located in South Asia and Southeast Asia, regions that contribute disproportionately to ocean plastic pollution primarily because they often lack the critical waste infrastructure to manage the problem. They were created in collaboration with Closed Loop Partners and Ocean Conservancy, and their founding investors are expected to include PepsiCo, the first investor; Procter & Gamble, Dow, Danone, Unilever and The Coca-Cola Company. They are also supported by many other leading consumer product goods and chemical companies, intergovernmental organizations and associations including 3M, American Chemistry Council, Kimberly-Clark, Partnerships in Environmental Management for the Seas of East Asia (PEMSEA) and the World Plastics Council.

Circulate Capital

Bunge Ventures is an investment arm of Bunge Ltd.

Bunge Ventures

Lewis & Clark AgriFood is a group of experienced investors, scientists, operators, and owners who are passionate about investing in companies that are at the forefront of food and agriculture innovation. They look for companies that deliver benefits to the stakeholders in the food and agriculture sector, from the producer, through the supply chain, all the way to the consumer. The firm invests in companies that are at the growth stage of their evolution, poised to scale their technology to a national or global scale.

Lewis & Clark AgriFood

Arzeda

Arzeda harnesses the power of Intelligent Protein Design Technology™ - combining physics-based protein design and AI algorithms - to create and manufacture new designer proteins and enzymes that enhance our lives and protect our planet. In partnership with Fortune 500 companies and industrial leaders, we develop healthy and sustainable products for the food & nutrition, consumer products, advanced materials, and diagnostics & pharma industries globally - delivering on the promise of biotechnology

<div><p>Arzeda specializes in protein design technology, which is based on protein biophysics and metabolic biochemistry models coupled with large-scale computing. It integrates protein design, pathway design, HT screening, and strain construction to create designer fermentation strains for any chemical. Scribe, its statistical learning software for DNA writing, is used to select proteins and enzymes that are compatible with target hosts, and then concurrently engineers protein stability, high expression, and enzyme selectivity to limit by-product production. Arzeda is experimenting with solutions for agriculture, functionalized sweeteners and ingredients, advanced chemicals and materials, and pharmaceuticals and diagnostics.</p></div>

Enhancing seed and crop traits via biotechnology

Crop Biotech

Arzeda Partnership Looks to Revolutionize the Future of Designer Proteins

Takeda

The collaboration will allow Takeda to leverage Arzeda's Intelligent Protein Design Technology™

Artificial intelligence is identifying and testing new therapies faster than ever.

AI Drug Discovery

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies providing their ML platform to other pharma companies for drug discovery services such as target selection, validation and lead optimization.

Unilever

The aim of the partnership is to apply the latest advances in digital biology to discovering and designing new enzymes

BP and Arzeda have entered a second extended collaboration agreement for developing a bio-process for production of a renewable chemical

Earth-friendly biotech solutions for the textile, packaging and construction industries.

Bio-based Materials

Developers of alternative materials for industrial applications such as sporting goods, electronic components, and automotive parts

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    Arzeda specializes in protein design technology, which is based on protein biophysics and metabolic biochemistry models coupled with large-scale computing. It integrates protein design, pathway design, HT screening, and strain construction to create designer fermentation strains for any chemical. Scribe, its statistical learning software for DNA writing, is used to select proteins and enzymes that are compatible with target hosts, and then concurrently engineers protein stability, high expression, and enzyme selectivity to limit by-product production. Arzeda is experimenting with solutions for agriculture, functionalized sweeteners and ingredients, advanced chemicals and materials, and pharmaceuticals and diagnostics.
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<p><span>Lone Star Industrial Materials is a cultivation company that manufactures raw hemp materials. Its product portfolio consists of bast fiber, refined cellulose, and hemp hurd, seeds, hearts, fines and oil. Additionally, it offers retail products such as HempSorb, animal bedding, and hemp control socks. Hemp requires less land, improves nutritional health, is environmentally friendly, helps soil regeneration, grows in various climates, absorbs a great deal of CO2, is a rotational crop and reduces waste. Hemp is used in construction, insulation, bioplastics, and as hemp wood. The privately held company has developed an end-to-end supply chain from seed genetics to delivery.</span></p>

Lone Star Industrial Materials

<p><span>PLANTeDIT operates in the plant genome editing field to produce improved crop species through transformation technology and a CRISPR/Cas9 delivery system. It produces regulatory-free, consumer-oriented, DNA-free and sustainable genome edited crops and biopharmaceuticals. The company’s offering includes non-transgenic high oleic soya, which is produced by mutating the FAD2 gene, which eventually increases the oleic oil content in the soya bean. This product was developed through a collaboration between PLANTeDIT and ToolGen. The organization has also collaborated with RebelBio, University College Cork and IAPB. Headquartered in Cork, Ireland, PLANTeDIT is privately held.</span></p>

PLANTEDIT

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    Amforo is a biotech company that focuses on developing foods that are high in protein by enhancing the nutritional density of food and feed crops through the platform of technologies it has built. The company offers a family of feed and food crops, including primary ingredients for suppliers of plant-based meat and dairy alternatives. In addition, it is focused on developing a low-cost, plant-based source of protein for farmed seafood. Moreover, Amforo is pursuing approaches to enhance the nutritional profile of crops as well as their protein content, which entails optimizing amino acid profiles, modifying carbohydrates, and enhancing micronutrients.
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Amfora

<p><span>BioHeuris provides weed management solutions by combining synthetic biology and gene editing to develop herbicide resistant crops. Its offering includes Heurik, a technology platform that integrates rational design and directed evolution to identify mutations that confer herbicide tolerance, while Swap is the platform that introduces these mutations in crops using gene editing. The company cultivates soybeans, sorghum, rice, cotton, and alfalfa. It has partnered with Santa Rosa Semillas, Adecoagro, Gensus, GDM, Aceleradora Litoral, Tobin, Rotam, Asociación de Cooperativas Argentinas, Benson Hill, and Plant Science Center. Headquartered in Rosario, Argentina, BioHeuris is privately held with an office in the US.</span></p>

BioHeuris

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    Tropic Biosciences is a privately held developer of high-performing commercial varieties of tropical crops that promote cultivation efficiencies, improve sustainable environmental practices and enhance consumer health through its use of cutting-edge genetic editing technologies. Its GEiGS Technology combines gene editing and RNAi in a single platform that enables critical disease resistance and quality improvement traits. The technology caters to the banana production, row crops, livestock, and poultry industries. The company’s partners include Temasek, Agronomics, Polaris Founders Capital, and Excellence Through Stewardship. Headquartered in the UK, Tropical Biosciences has been featured in The Telegraph, Nature, Fast Company, and the Financial Times. 
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Tropic Biosciences

Companies that develop or use biological, physical and chemical agents and techniques to provide protection and improve the quality of a seed. This includes the sale of seed coating, or seed enhancement products as methods to treat seeds.

Companies that redesign large clusters of genes and gene parts rather than modifying or engineering a single gene for improving the traits of a plant.

Companies that utilize genetic engineering tools and technologies to use existing and naturally present gene variants in a plant and the natural process of breeding such as inbreeding, and linebreeding to develop better traits for plants.

Companies that use transgenesis processes like tissue culturing to develop transgenic plants or seeds by inserting new genes into them from other plants or in certain instances other organisms like bacteria or even animals.

Companies that offer techniques such as epigenetics, RNA interference (RNAi) to temporarily block a specific gene that would trigger unwanted effect such as a disease on a plant.

Companies that develop a platform to insert, edit, or delete the DNA of a plant itself using approaches such as CRISPR-Cas 9, TALENs, and Zinc Fingers. These approaches help develop plant genes or seeds with traits such as disease-resistant, enhanced-performance, or improve yield.

Biotech solutions to produce crops that are sustainable and offer better traits

Offers customization of genes and traits as required by farmers

Uses AI/machine learning to facilitate their platform/biotech processes like gene editing

Arzeda

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