"ÄIO was co-founded by biotechnology scientists Nemailla Bonturi and Petri-Jaan Lahtvee based on Bonturi's doctoral research. During her studies she invented a new microbe, a strain of yeast. Instead of consuming sugar and outputting carbon dioxide gas or alcohol as with bread and beer, this yeast consumes sugar and outputs fat molecules. The company will show off its tech as part of Startup Battlefield at this year's TechCrunch Disrupt, which runs later this month in San Francisco."
"Lahtvee was a professor of Food Tech and Bioengineering at Estonia's Tallinn University of Technology and, in 2016, running his own biotech lab there with Bonturi his first hire. She brought her microbe with her, and they worked on the molecule, altering it to be hardy enough to be manufactured. As Estonia has a large agriculture base of corn and other food grains, as well as sugarcane and lumber, the lab studied how sugars produced from those ag waste streams could feed this microbe. "We started working on it, developing metabolic engineering tools," Lahtvee told TechCrunch. The answer: It could consume those sugars quite well."
Äio is an Estonian biotech company that uses an engineered yeast strain to convert sugars from agricultural waste such as sawdust, corn, sugarcane, and lumber-derived streams into fat molecules for food and cosmetic applications. The yeast originated from doctoral research and produces fats instead of alcohol or carbon dioxide, and has been metabolically engineered to be hardy for manufacturing. The produced fat profile closely resembles existing fats and, in solid form, most closely resembles chicken fat, with composition adjustable through further modification. The process aims to reduce reliance on palm oil and associated ecosystem damage.
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