Alumni Feature: GENECIS BIOINDUSTRIES

The second season of XTC’s worldwide competition of startups addressing the major challenges outlined in the UN Sustainable Development Goals just completed last month at the XTC 2021 Global Finals presented by TechCrunch.

So, we thought it a great time to check back with last year’s Global Winner – GENECIS BIOINDUSTRIES, Inc. – to learn about their progress since XTC. As it happened, just 3 business days after our Global Finals, Genecis announced the award of a $6 million project from a Canadian government advanced manufacturing supercluster program. In this project, they will integrate their demonstration plant for upscaling organic waste into high-value polyhydroxyalkanoate bioplastics, the most promising alternative to petroleum plastics.

And just a few weeks prior, they filed provisional patent protection for the world’s 1st recombinant bacteria that converts food waste into tunable bioplastic polymers.

Genecis is partnering with StormFisher, an industry-leading developer and operator of organic waste processing facilities that produce renewable natural gas through a process called anaerobic digestion. StormFisher operates multiple commercial sites in Canada and was recently named 2021 Project of the Year by the Canadian Biogas Association. This project will benchmark an innovative, cheaper, and faster method of scaling biomanufacturing – by piggy-backing Genecis’ groundbreaking technology onto the existing infrastructure of a biogas plant. It was the large commercial potential of this one-two punch of ingenuity and waste reduction that propelled Genecis to win the 2020 Extreme Tech Challenge.

Extreme Tech Challenge is about fostering deal flow to funnel investment towards responsible innovation for a radically better world. So we were pleased to hear from Luna Yu, Genecis CEO: “Through XTC, we have connected with a number of very interested investors who have indicated interest in participating in our forthcoming Series A round”.

XTC works at the intersection of responsible innovation and profitable commercial success and Robert Celik, Genecis’ head of Growth and Partnerships added: “Over the last few quarters, Genecis has booked nearly $1-million in revenue for proprietary R&D projects along with receiving sizeable commitments for purchase of our PHA materials once our commercial facility is running”. Luna Yu continued “winning the Extreme Tech Challenge was most certainly a powerful validation, along with other strong accolades Genecis won, in our efforts to scale our technology and generate revenue with world-class partners.”

Genecis is just the latest in a string of announcements of funding and commercial growth among our 2020 Finalists since they participated in Extreme Tech Challenge, a partial list is included below. We are humbled and honored to include such successful companies in our growing XTC Community and look forward to similar successes from the 80 Finalists in our 2021 cohort. XTC curates these outstanding ventures from over 20 partner led competitions on every continent integrating over 300 seasoned evaluators to roll-up to our Global Finals process each June.If you want to engage with this specially curated community of startups with responsible innovation for a radically better world, please join us by becoming an XTC Sponsor. Learn more HERE.

• Rewire [Category Winner] $20M
• SPRK.Global [Category Winner] 7-figure seed financing
• MicroGen Biotech [Category and Female Founder Winner] $3.8M Series A
• Drishti $25M
• CropX 3 acquisitions in the past year
• Turtle Tree Labs $6.2M Pre-A Round
• Elucidata $5M Pre-A round
• FreshoKartz ₹10Cr Round
• MeduSoil CHF2M seed funding