Pivot Bio, Inc.

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• Did you know2024

  Pivot Bio's PROVEN nitrogen-fixing microbe product attacks the supply chain foundation of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer — the Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process, which consumes approximately 1-2% of global energy (natural gas → hydrogen → ammonia synthesis under 200 atm and 450°C) and produces the nitrogen fertilizer that currently provides roughly 50% of all the nitrogen in the food humans eat. US corn (the world's largest single crop by tonnage) uses approximately 5-6 million tons of anhydrous ammonia and urea per year — the largest single end-market for synthetic nitrogen. If Pivot Bio's PROVEN 40 achieves 40 lbs/acre nitrogen replacement at 90 million US corn acres, it could displace up to 1.8 million tons of synthetic nitrogen per year from the US corn belt — equivalent to approximately 30% of US nitrogen fertilizer demand for corn. Pivot Bio's synthetic biology startup in Berkeley is the most credible current threat to the natural gas → ammonia → corn fertilizer supply chain that currently determines food prices for 8 billion people — backed by Gates Breakthrough Energy capital that simultaneously funds EV battery, fusion, and agricultural nitrogen disruption.

  Pivot Bio, Inc. ↗

• Concentration2024

  Pivot Bio has established a first-mover commercial position in microbial nitrogen fixation for corn — the largest single crop application with the highest nitrogen fertilizer demand. With approximately 15-20 million US corn acres using Pivot Bio PROVEN by 2023-2024, they have more commercial biological nitrogen fixation acres in non-legume crops than all other companies combined. However, the agricultural biologicals competitive landscape is intensifying: Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, and Corteva all have significant microbial nitrogen programs, and Joyn Bio (Ginkgo Bioworks + Bayer) and Indigo Ag (now Joyn) have competing approaches. The Pivot Bio synthetic biology microbial platform (re-engineering existing corn microbiome bacteria) is differentiated from these competitors, but the critical nitrogen fertilizer displacement market is attracting the full resources of the major agrochemical companies — who also sell the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers that Pivot Bio is trying to replace and therefore have incentives both to develop and to delay biological nitrogen fixation competing products.

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• Origin2024

  Pivot Bio was founded in 2011 by Karsten Temme and Caelinn Ledesma, two synthetic biologists working at UC Berkeley who identified that the soil microbes naturally living on corn roots already carry the genetic machinery for nitrogen fixation (nif genes) — but suppress it because they detect synthetic nitrogen fertilizer in the soil and don't need to do the metabolic work of fixation when nitrogen is freely available. Rather than introducing foreign nitrogen-fixing bacteria (as traditional inoculant companies do), Pivot Bio's approach was to use synthetic biology (CRISPR and transcription factor engineering) to reprogram existing corn root-associated bacteria to fix nitrogen continuously throughout the growing season even in the presence of synthetic nitrogen. The result: a microbe that evolved to be "lazy" about nitrogen fixation is re-engineered to always do it, replacing a portion of the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer that farmers apply to corn. Pivot Bio has raised over $500 million including from Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Singapore's Temasek sovereign wealth fund — making it the most-capitalized pure-play biological nitrogen fixation company in history.

  Pivot Bio, Inc. ↗