# Anomaly Bio

Turning microbes into micro-factories to rebuild ingredient supply chains

- Team: Armaan Dhanda (Co-CEO), Samyak Baid (Co-CEO)
- Founded: 2022
- Invested: 2025
- Links: [Website](https://www.anomalybio.com/), [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/anomaly-bio/)
- Field: Materials and the built world

## The problem: How do you brew an ingredient instead of farming it?

### How microbes make things

Precision fermentation uses microorganisms to make one specific molecule. Bacteria or yeast turn out large amounts of a target compound, which is then extracted and purified from the fermentation broth. Brewing beer keeps the whole murky mix. Here the goal is a single molecule at high purity. The idea is older than the name: insulin, and chymosin (the rennet in cheese), have been made this way for decades.

The microbe works as a cell factory. It eats a feedstock, today mostly refined glucose from food crops, and passes it along a chain of enzyme reactions until it comes out as the product. Metabolic engineering is the craft of rewiring that chain. Turn up the enzymes that lead toward the product, turn down or knock out the ones that make by-products, and sometimes borrow enzymes from other organisms entirely.

The cells grow in bioreactors, tanks where pH, temperature, stirring and air are all controlled, and where the medium, air and equipment are sterilized so nothing else moves in. Then the product has to be pulled back out: first the cells and debris, then most of the water, which is the main impurity. That last stretch is called downstream processing.

### Why it is hard

**The farm sets the price.** A brewed molecule still has to beat the plant or animal it replaces. Artemisinin, a malaria drug, comes from sweet wormwood, and engineered yeast can make a precursor far more efficiently than extraction from the plant. Yet when semisynthetic artemisinin went into commercial production, it was set to sell for roughly the same price per kilogram as the plant-derived kind. Proteins face the same wall: a kilogram of whey costs much more from a fermenter than from a cow.

**Grams per litre.** The number that decides the economics is titer: how much product you get per volume of liquid, usually in grams per litre. Then comes yield, how much of it survives purification. Both have to rise for fermentation to compete. Plenty of molecules have so far been made only at small scale or at low titres, and need more process work before they can compete with other ways of making them.

**Big tanks mix badly.** Development happens in lab bioreactors of 0.5 to 10 litres, and the best case is scaling up to several hundred cubic metres. In a small tank mixing takes under five seconds. In a big one it takes much longer, so cells drift through oxygen-starved or sugar-rich zones as they circulate, like swimmers passing through warm and cold patches in a lake. That can mean lower productivity, more by-products and less biomass.

**Getting it back out.** Pulling the product out of the broth can account for up to 85% of the cost of making biologics. Food and farm ingredients may not need that level of purity, but separation still eats money. The whole process also takes a lot of energy, for heating, cooling, stirring and downstream processing.

### What Anomaly Bio is after

Many ingredients come from crops that weather and politics can knock over. After a tropical cyclone hit Madagascar, the biggest vanilla grower, prices rose sharply, and the cyclone plus political instability and poor weather pushed vanilla to US$500 a kilogram. Artemisinin swung between US$120 and $1,200 per kilogram over just a few years.

Anomaly Bio wants to take the crop out of the equation. It engineers microbes into micro-factories that turn simple sugars into functional ingredients for nutrition, crop protection and personal care, and the goal is to replace fragile supply chains with production that is on demand and "viable anywhere in the world."

### How they go at it

**Pathways, not plantations.** The core work is strain engineering. Anomaly designs optimized metabolic pathways in microorganisms so they convert readily available feedstocks, such as sugars, into high-value molecules. It pitches this as a step change from extraction-based methods.

**Sugar, water, a tank.** The inputs are meant to be boring: "all we need is sugar, water, electricity, and a tank." The bet is that decoupling production from biological and environmental constraints lets a plant sit wherever it is needed.

### Still open

Can microbes eat something other than sugar? Crop sugars cost more and compete with the food supply. Sugars from agricultural residues avoid that competition, and carbon dioxide, methane, formate and methanol are considered highly sustainable feedstocks, but major challenges remain before they are used in mainstream manufacturing.

Can you predict the big tank from the small one? Fluid simulations can show how gradients form, but they cannot capture how living cells respond to shifting conditions, and simulating a large bioreactor can take weeks to months. Labs build scale-down bioreactors to mimic the big tank instead. In simulations, feeding at several well-placed points cut mixing times from minutes to about ten seconds.

### Words used here

- **Precision fermentation**: Using microbes to manufacture one specific molecule, which is then purified out of the culture.
- **fermentation broth**: The liquid in the tank at the end of a run: cells, leftover nutrients, by-products and the product itself.
- **feedstock**: The raw material, usually a sugar, that the microbes eat for carbon and energy.
- **Metabolic engineering**: Changing a cell's genes and enzymes so that more of its chemistry flows toward a chosen product.
- **bioreactors**: Controlled tanks where microbes are grown, with set temperature, pH, stirring and air supply.
- **titer**: How much product a fermentation makes per volume of liquid, usually in grams per litre.
- **downstream processing**: Everything after the fermentation that separates, concentrates and purifies the product.

## About Anomaly Bio

Anomaly Bio is a Singapore-based company developing next-generation inputs through advanced fermentation and strain engineering. Anomaly engineers microbes to convert readily available feedstocks, such as sugars, into high-value molecules for applications in crop protection, nutrition, and personal care.

By transforming microbes into efficient cell factories, Anomaly aims to replace fragile supply chains with scalable, on-demand, and globally viable biomanufacturing that redefines how essential ingredients are made.

## Sources

1. [Precision fermentation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_fermentation), Wikipedia
2. [Industrial fermentation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_fermentation), Wikipedia
3. [Downstream processing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downstream_processing), Wikipedia
4. [Artemisinin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin), Wikipedia
5. [Precision Fermentation: Pathways to Cost Parity](https://www.synthesis.capital/insights/precision-fermentation-pathways-to-cost-parity), Synthesis Capital
6. [The science of fermentation](https://gfi.org/science/the-science-of-fermentation/), Good Food Institute
7. [Scale-down bioreactors: comparative analysis of configurations](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12460589/), PubMed Central
8. [Substantial gradient mitigation in simulated large-scale bioreactors by optimally placed multiple feed points](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9828524/), PubMed Central
9. [Vanilla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla), Wikipedia
10. [Building The Future of Ingredient Supply Chains](https://www.anomalybio.com/), Anomaly Bio
11. [Anomaly Bio: turning microbes into micro-factories](https://www.anomalybio.com/blog/singapore-s-anomaly-bio-raises-us-2-6m-to-turn-microbes-into-micro-factories-for-resilient-ingredient-supply-chains), Anomaly Bio