Biosphere Lands $21M From the Department of War to Build a Bioreactor Cleaned With Light

West Oakland already knows how to put microbes to work. At Ghost Town Brewing on Adeline Street, the metal is on the speakers and in the back: tall steel tanks where yeast turns sugar into beer. A typical craft brewery fermenter holds about 3,500 to 7,000 liters.

Less than a mile away, Biosphere's West Oakland team is planning a tank that holds 20,000 liters.

That is three to six brewery fermenters combined. It will not make beer. It will make specialty chemicals. And the U.S. government is paying for it. The Department of War has awarded Biosphere $21 million to build, run, and prove out the system. The site is still being chosen, and the plant should be running by late 2027.

The difference is cleanliness. Biosphere's tank has to stay nearly as clean as a drug plant's, and it plans to do that with light.

Germs love the broth

Making things with microbes works a lot like brewing beer. You fill a tank with sugary broth, add a microbe, and let it make your product. The trouble is that every other germ loves that broth too. If one sneaks in, the batch is ruined.

Beer and corn ethanol mostly get away with it. The yeast crowd out the competition, and the alcohol keeps other germs down. Most other products cannot. Enzymes, food ingredients, and specialty chemicals are made by engineered microbes that get overrun fast. Those tanks have to be perfectly clean.

“Unlike a microbrewery, where it's just kind of like normal food and bev stuff, you are forced to go much closer to biopharmaceutical type equipment,” said Biosphere CEO Brian Heligman.

The plumbing is the expensive part

The standard way to clean a tank is steam, like a giant pressure cooker. That means the tank has to be built like one: thick, pressure-rated steel, a boiler, and a web of pipes and valves designed to drain clean. A new 2,000-liter stainless steel tank alone can cost $500,000 to $1 million, according to cocoa startup California Cultured. Industry estimates put the piping, utilities, and cleaning systems around a tank at several times the cost of the tank itself. The steel is expensive. The plumbing is worse.

Drugmakers found steam so painful that for smaller batches they switched to disposable plastic bags. Use one once, throw it away.

“The biopharma industry actually has abandoned steam sterilization because it is too expensive and unreliable.”

BRIAN HELIGMAN, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, BIOSPHERE

That works for medicine, which is worth a lot per gram. It does not work for chemicals or food. Bags top out at a few thousand liters, and by industry estimates the throwaway parts can run tens of thousands of dollars per batch.

So makers of everyday bioproducts are stuck. They need near-drug-level cleanliness at chemical-level prices.

Cleaning with light

Biosphere, which Heligman co-founded in 2022 with COO Arye Lipman, cleans its tanks with UV light, the same kind used to sanitize hospital rooms. UV works well on smooth, hard surfaces, and the inside of a tank is mostly smooth, hard surfaces. No steam means no pressure cooker, which means far less plumbing. “We saw UV sterilization as a way that we could simplify the auxiliary process piping and vessel requirements substantially,” Heligman said.

For this first big tank, Biosphere kept the shape familiar on purpose. Engineers trust what they recognize. “We ended up landing on a form factor that'll be more familiar to bioprocess engineers,” Heligman said. Stranger, more efficient designs will be tested at smaller scale alongside it.

UV does not remove every engineering problem. Microbes give off a lot of heat as they work, and pulling that heat out and getting oxygen in are the next challenges Biosphere wants to tackle.

“A reactor is kind of like an engine that burns sugar.”

BRIAN HELIGMAN, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, BIOSPHERE

What the government is buying

The department is not buying chemicals yet. It is buying proof that a cheaper kind of plant works at a size that matters.

“One of the whole problems with innovating on manufacturing systems is you need demonstration of robustness at a relevant scale to be taken seriously.”

BRIAN HELIGMAN, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, BIOSPHERE

The size is the point. The tank dwarfs the 1,000-liter systems military labs use for test batches and should make about 100 tons of product a year. That is still tiny next to a petrochemical plant. Most commercial fermentation tanks are no more than about 10 times bigger. “We like the 20,000-liter range,” Heligman said, “which is big enough to produce reasonable quantities of product, but still small enough that you can be fairly flexible.”

The government is stepping in because of a gap the market will not fill. Many chemicals the military needs have little civilian demand. Defense spending on them rises and falls. Traditional manufacturers will not build U.S. capacity on that. And the Bay Area knows the other half of the story: plenty of startups with working science stalled on the cost of their first plant.

“They're not the biggest customer in the world for some of these products, but they're looking for how they can efficiently bring them to bear.”

BRIAN HELIGMAN, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, BIOSPHERE

The money came through the Defense Industrial Base Consortium, a Pentagon contracting vehicle for prototypes. It is not a loan, and the government takes no stake in the company. In return, the Pentagon gets a working plant plus the engineering and economic analysis needed to judge bigger ones. It is Biosphere's second defense award this year, after a $9 million Army contract in May to build a portable system that makes food from air, water, and electricity.

Rethinking the tank

Biosphere is not alone. Across the industry, companies are rethinking how and where things get made, often with government money behind them. Capra Biosciences has received about $17 million from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to make drug ingredients in the U.S. Antheia added $9 million from HHS in March to make pharmaceutical ingredients at home. California Cultured, which grows cocoa from plant cells, runs reusable 2,000-liter plastic tanks it says cost about $3,000 each to build.

The common thread: steel-and-steam plants are too expensive for most new products, so the hardware itself is up for reinvention.

It takes hands

A contract does not run a plant. People do. Over the next year, Biosphere has to pick its Bay Area site, order the long-lead equipment, and get a 20,000-liter tank running by late 2027. Every step takes hands.

That is why Heligman's first ask was talent.

“If people are interested in building an innovative biomanufacturing facility, we do think we have some pretty exciting opportunities to bring technology to bear. They could have a lot of impact across this sector.”

BRIAN HELIGMAN, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, BIOSPHERE

The people who join now will shape more than one tank. Heligman sees the facility as a test bed for further changes to how fermentation plants are built, including better ways to get oxygen in and heat out. Down the line, he wants it to be a launch pad where food, agriculture, and specialty chemical companies run their first real production batches.

“Helping to get those profitable niches more effectively into customers' hands is going to be one of the keys for unlocking broader growth across the industry.”

BRIAN HELIGMAN, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, BIOSPHERE

For engineers who have spent careers working around steam-era plants, this is a chance to build the alternative from the ground up, in the Bay Area. Recent openings have included plant automation and controls engineers and UV sterilization scientists. Current roles are listed at job-boards.greenhouse.io/biosphere.