At Amplify Capital, we actively support and invest in mission-driven founders and their startups across North America, focusing on healthcare, education, and environmental technologies. Our thesis is grounded in backing companies where purpose drives profit to deliver scalable and outsized financial and impact returns.
We believe we can foster impact investing and transform how we think about investing by doing well and doing good.
The Problem
Transitioning from chemical to bio-fermentation processes can be challenging – biological products created in bio-fermentation are unpredictable. In bio-fermentation, bioreactor environments need precise regulation of pH, temperature, and other parameters to meet customer specifications. Current solutions offer limited and delayed data, impairing precise control of these processes, which leads to production loss, inconsistent quality, and suboptimal output.
The negative outcomes from these constraints include considerable waste, decreased throughput, and increased costs. These outcomes are slowing the transition towards more sustainable biomanufacturing. Industrial-scale precision fermentation is part of the emerging solution, but the biggest hurdle remains obtaining real-time, precise measurements of several parameters in a bioreactor.
The Solution
To catalyze industrial decarbonization, we must move away from energy-intensive manufacturing to more energy-efficient, low carbon footprint alternatives, such as bio-fermentation. Quebec-based BioIntelligence Technologies (BIT) provides solutions for reducing the carbon footprint in large-scale bio-manufacturing industries like chemical production, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and certain food applications. BIT's analytics can alleviate challenges in biomanufacturing by reducing production losses and increasing yields by 5-10% per batch. This improvement fosters the adoption of more sustainable manufacturing processes.
BIT integrates hardware and software, utilizing machine learning to enhance decision-making for bio-processes and fermentation. It enables real-time automated modeling and analysis, improves replicability, and can detect minor variations and low concentrations of required products. By empowering the industrial biotechnology and synthetic biology sectors, BIT facilitates the production of less carbon-intensive products on an industrial scale, reducing GHG emissions, land, and water usage over time.
Investment Thesis
The US government issued an executive order to advance biotech and biomanufacturing for a sustainable bioeconomy, and global demand for fermentation production capacity is projected to reach over 1B litres by 2050. The sector is in dire need of innovation to improve its capacity to meet growing demand. Solutions like BIT are exactly what we are looking for to support the transition to more sustainable manufacturing processes.
The Amplify Capital team first connected with CEO and co-founder Joel Sirois in October 2021 via Amplify’s industry connections. Joel’s vision for BIT is to bring biomanufacturing processes up to the same standard levels as traditional industry. This includes enabling precise and continuous measurements that are provided to operators in real time.
Our shared vision for a climate-centric portfolio made BIT an appealing investment. Joel demonstrated commitment to align with an investor who not only understands BIT's climate mission and potential in the evolving bioeconomy but also has a record of adding value to its companies. We see BIT as a perfect fit, complementing our industrial decarbonization thesis, and view it as a best-in-class platform technology. We believe BIT will be catalytic, propelling developments around "waste to value", particularly in synthetic biology.
Impact
Stakeholders benefit from two key value impacts:
BIT’s technology reduces production losses by 10% - 40% in fermentation and cell culture facilities.
BIT improves conversion yields, decreasing waste and resulting in avoided CO2e emissions as overproduction is avoided. This increased efficiency also allows for a transition towards less carbon-intensive Synbio manufacturing, amplifying the company's positive environmental impact.
As BIT serves customers across multiple sectors, it has the potential to make a meaningful contribution towards avoiding and reducing CO2e emissions, reducing energy consumption and waste, and accelerating the transition away from more polluting manufacturing processes. BIT also addresses several SDGs. Below are the primary SDGs Amplify determined to be most relevant to the Company’s operations:
SDG 13 Climate Action - Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impact.
SDG 6 - Clean Water and Sanitation - Targets 6.3 & 6.4: improve water quality by reducing pollution and substantially increase water-use efficiency across all sectors.
SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure). Target 9.4 through upgrading infrastructure and retrofit industries to make them sustainable, with increased resource-use efficiency and greater adoption of clean and environmentally sound technologies and industrial processes.
SDG 12 Responsible Consumption and Production - Targets 12.2 & 12.4: achieve the sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources, and the environmentally sound management of chemicals and all wastes throughout their life cycle and significantly reduce their release to air, water and soil in order to minimize their adverse impacts on human health and the environment.
We’re thrilled to welcome BioIntelligence Technologies to Amplify’s growing portfolio! Feel free to follow BioIntelligence’s journey with us. Remember to subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on Amplify Capital’s exciting companies.
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