Erg Bio Raises $6.5M to Enable a Bioeconomy Built on Non-Food, Widely Available Biomass

The promise of the bioeconomy feels closer than ever. McKinsey estimates that biotechnology could eventually produce as much as 60 percent of global physical inputs, from fuels and materials to specialty chemicals. Yet one bottleneck continues to hold the field back: almost all precision fermentation relies on glucose. And glucose, despite being simple and familiar, is volatile and tied directly to global food systems.

“We need to find alternatives for glucose if the bioeconomy is ever going to reach its full potential,” said John Cumbers, CEO of SynBioBeta and an advisor to Erg Bio. “Glucose is expensive, it competes with food, and it’s fundamentally the wrong carbon foundation for a world that wants to scale biomanufacturing into the trillions.”

Erg Bio is working on delivering an answer by designing solvent systems that convert messy, heterogeneous waste biomass into clean, fermentable inputs. The idea is straightforward. If agricultural residues, forestry byproducts, and municipal waste can become a reliable, low-cost carbon source, biomanufacturing will shift in a way that glucose simply cannot match. Investors are beginning to place that bet.

The company has raised a $6.5 million seed round led by Azolla Ventures, with participation from Chevron Technology Ventures, Freeflow, Plug and Play, and several strategic angels. The funding arrives alongside a $1.5 million Department of Defense award to advance Erg Bio’s ASPIRE™ Technology at pre-pilot scale and build domestic, waste-based biofuels and biochemical capacity. We sat down with CEO Vineet Rajgarhia and John Cumbers to discuss Erg Bio’s recent momentum and what comes next. Rajgarhia will share more of this vision on stage in May 2026 at SynBioBeta in San Jose, where he’ll join a panel on biomanufacturing.

Erg Bio was founded by two veteran innovators, Vineet Rajgarhia and Blake Simmons. Together, they bring more than fifty years of experience across biofuels, catalysis, bioplastics, and large-scale bioprocess engineering.

Rajgarhia has held leadership roles at Cargill, Mascoma, and TotalEnergies, where he helped develop industrial PLA bioplastics and advance consolidated bioprocessing using yeast. He holds more than 30 patents and has earned an U.S. EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award.

Simmons is Director of Biological Systems and Engineering at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and CTO of the Joint BioEnergy Institute. He has authored over 450 papers, holds more than 50 patents, and is a member of the National Academy of Inventors. His research on distillable protic solvents helped lay the chemical groundwork that Erg Bio is now commercializing.

“These founders have seen every iteration of biomass conversion, from what works to what breaks to what won’t scale,” said Cumbers. “If anyone can crack this problem, it’s them.”

The United States generates more than a billion tons of sustainable biomass every year, according to the Department of Energy. Despite this abundance, the bioeconomy has struggled to use it effectively.

Agricultural residues, forestry waste, and food waste are chemically complex and vary widely from batch to batch. Traditional pretreatment methods depend on high temperatures, harsh chemicals, large quantities of water, or expensive enzyme cocktails. Each step adds cost, energy use, and operational risk.

Fermentation plants rely on clean, predictable sugars, which have entrenched the industry’s dependence on glucose. It is easy to work with, but its price, availability, and connection to agriculture limit the scale of biomanufacturing.

Erg Bio takes a different approach. The company has developed a low-temperature solvent pretreatment that can process more than 30 different biomass feedstocks at moderate conditions compared to conventional routes. The process reduces energy demands, delivers high sugar yields, and allows the solvent to be recovered and reused.

“Our goal is simple yet transformative. We want to turn the world’s most overlooked and abundantly available resources into cost-competitive synthetic aviation fuels and biochemicals,” said Rajgarhia. “This investment allows us to strengthen technical validation and move toward pilot-scale demonstrations.”

Simmons emphasized that the technology was designed with industry realities in mind. “Erg Bio’s process is built for scalability,” he says, “It is engineered for efficiency and for the variability of real-world feedstocks.”

Erg Bio is initially targeting markets that can absorb large volumes of non-food-grade materials. The sugar stream coming out of the ASPIRE process can feed into the production of advanced aviation fuels and biochemicals. The lignin stream can be used in adhesive and materials applications.

By focusing on industrial and materials markets first, Erg Bio avoids the purity requirements of food-grade sugars and builds early commercial traction.

Although this is labeled a seed round, it follows significant non-dilutive support, including a $1.5 million Department of Defense award.

The new funding will support several major transitions. Erg Bio plans to begin operating its first pilot facility, validate techno-economics at scale, and produce multi-kilogram batches of fuel and materials intermediates from agricultural residues. The company also plans to secure offtake agreements for its products, expand its technical and commercial teams, and complete the engineering design package for its first commercial plant.

“We’re moving from proven science to a fully scalable industrial demonstration,” says Rajgarhia.

Across the field, there is a growing conviction that the future of biomanufacturing depends on cheap, abundant, non-food carbon.

“We have huge quantities of agricultural, forestry, and municipal waste,” Cumbers said. “What’s been missing is a reliable way to convert that into the clean sugars microbes need. If Erg Bio can make waste-derived sugars as dependable as glucose, it could help build the carbon infrastructure the bioeconomy has been waiting for.”

As synthetic biology companies push toward global materials and fuels markets, the feedstock challenge becomes unavoidable. Erg Bio is betting that it can finally solve it. If it succeeds, the industry will move away from food-based sugars and toward a bioeconomy built on carbon we already throw away.