1849 bio

Summer 2024Active

Engineering microbes for miners to unlock billions in trapped metal

Save

1849 bio

Summer 2024Active

Engineering microbes for miners to unlock billions in trapped metal

Save

Company details

1849 bio designs microbes enabling cheap metal extraction allowing miners to unlock value from low quality copper and gold ores. Surprisingly, the mining industry is one of the largest scale users of biotech in the world with biomining processes accounting for ~1% of global copper production. Biomining is ultra-low cost, running around ~$1/ton of ore vs ~$7/ton for conventional processes.

Unfortunately, while biomining is cheap, it can’t be applied to over 80% of copper ores, leaving vast resources without profitable extraction methods. An estimated ~$800B of copper sit today in waste materials and stockpiles with negative unit economics.

While a great deal of effort has been spent on optimizing microbial metal extraction processes, very little effort has been spent on optimizing the microbes themselves.

To change that, we’re creating new biotech tools and platforms applied directly to the types of biology most relevant to miners. This enables us to develop new microbes and tackle some of the most difficult problems in biomining, unlocking billions in value from unprofitable resources while being more environmentally friendly than conventional processes.

We’re world class microbial engineers. We met while doing our PhDs in synthetic biology, where we spent our time applying and developing the most advanced bioengineering technologies to engineer living cells.

Location

San Francisco, CA, USA

Founded

Unknown

Upgrade to Pro, then request the 1849 bio teardown.

This company does not have a completed analysis yet. Choose a Pro plan first, then use one of your 5 monthly research requests to have our agent investigate 1849 bio. The full teardown, rebuild plan, and technical specs unlock when it lands.

Use Pro to request the first 1849 bio teardown and keep the finished report in your account.
Read every completed teardown and rebuild plan already in the database.
Unlock implementation-ready technical specs and 5 fresh research requests each month.

Choose your Pro plan

$20/ month

Find one worth rebuilding, get the teardown, open the implementation-ready specs, and use fresh report requests when you want deeper research.

See Pro plans

Full teardown library

Specs for every company

5 fresh requests / month

CLI for agent imports