The cost of focus: how Checkerspot turned microalgae into a commercialization strategy

Checkerspot has spent the last two years turning a broad biotech platform into a focused commercial engine, with CEO John Krzywicki navigating hard pivots, molecule licensing, and a new model for fermentation-derived fats.

The future of food biotechnology has never lacked ambition, but translating that promise into real-world performance has been less consistent. Checkerspot’s story reflects that gap. When CEO John Krzywicki arrived in 2023, the company had built a strong microalgae fermentation platform. The challenge was not whether it worked, but where it fit commercially and how much complexity the business could carry.

“So it was a great place to get dropped into, even in the midst of a really challenging time for the industry overall,” Krzywicki reflects, “with a lot of things shifting, and a business at a particular moment where it had to figure out what was the best and highest-use way to commercialize its technology.”

That question forced clarity. Instead of asking how far the platform could stretch, the task became deciding where it would hold.

The company’s early model had been expansive by design. Microalgae-derived oils could be sold directly or pushed downstream into chemically modified materials for industrial applications. It was a technically elegant chain, but one that introduced extra steps at the wrong point in the company’s development.

“What we realized was that adding that extra step from a technology perspective just made everything downstream more complicated,” Krzywicki says, “and added complexity and risk.”

At the same time, those downstream markets were not structured for easy entry. Scale requirements were high, pricing pressure constant, and adoption cycles slow. Even well-functioning technology struggled to gain traction.

Food, nutrition, and personal care offered a different dynamic. The same technology – used without further modification – could meet immediate needs in markets already seeking better fats and more stable supply. The shift did not introduce new capability. It removed friction.

Focus, applied

The transition that followed was not easy. Narrowing the business meant reducing headcount, concentrating resources, and stepping away from areas that no longer fit.

“That meant some really hard choices and trade-offs,” Krzywicki admits, “and we had to slim the business down considerably. Those are real people with families and jobs who had contributed enormously to something they believed in.”

Customers bring an incredible level of rigor and discipline, and realizing that even your very best might not be good enough

Focus, in practice, is subtraction. It is the removal of optionality in favor of progress. “For startups, you don’t really want to be diversified,” he adds. “You want to be laser-focused on a particular set of applications.”

What that focus looks like at Checkerspot is now visible: a smaller set of molecules, a defined group of end markets, and a commercial model built around partners rather than ownership of the entire value chain.

At the center of that model is a heterotrophic microalga that behaves more like yeast than the algae most people imagine. It consumes sugar, not sunlight, and is well suited to fermentation systems that already operate at industrial scale.

“We work with a strain natively called Prototheca moriformis,” Krzywicki says, “which is, to our knowledge, the most efficient and best producer of oils among any microbial source known to man at this point.”

Efficiency, in this context, is not a conceptual advantage. It determines whether a molecule can be produced at a cost and scale that the market will accept. It is the threshold between demonstration and deployment.

Checkerspot’s approach treats microalgae as a production system for designing fats and oils that are difficult or impractical to source through conventional means.

When the markets speak

As the company moved toward commercialization, its route to market evolved alongside its focus. The idea that a startup could insert itself directly into global supply
chains gave way to a more grounded understanding of how those systems actually function. “What we realized is that really big companies want to buy from their trusted supply chains,” he says.

Rather than disrupt those relationships, Checkerspot chose to work through them. The 2024 partnership with AAK shows how the platform integrates into existing ingredient networks, while the 2025 tie-up with Huvepharma extended that approach into infant nutrition.

“Asking anyone to build hundreds of millions of dollars of new CapEx to produce your ingredient is a difficult, if not near-impossible, sell right now,” Krzywicki adds. Working within existing infrastructure, though, lowers barriers and accelerates adoption. It also reshapes the economics of the business itself.

“We can operate more like a traditional startup,” he says, “almost like a software company in terms of margins and capital intensity, while still having the upside of scaling through trusted industry partners.”

The implications of that model are now evident in the company’s outputs. In 2025, Checkerspot reported a high-oleic palm oil alternative produced through microalgae fermentation, achieving oil titers of up to 145g/L and roughly 70% oil content of dry cell weight. The profile closely matched conventional high-oleic palm oil, offering a route away from agricultural constraints tied to tropical production systems.

This year, the company published peer-reviewed work on palmitoleic acid, demonstrating production of omega-7 oil at up to 58% content. The process reached 20.9g/L
in 96 hours, establishing a fermentation-based pathway for an ingredient long limited by natural supply.

“It demonstrates that microalgae fermentation can serve as a precise, scalable, and sustainable production platform for one of the most critical fatty acids in nutritional science,” Krzywicki says.

Taken together, these developments reflect a consistent strategy. Identify molecules constrained by supply, then use fermentation to produce them at levels that enable real-world use.

Adaptable and versatile

Shifting from R&D to commercialization introduces a new standard of performance. What defines success changes, and so does the work required. “Every company moving from an R&D enterprise to a commercial one undergoes a powerful and difficult transition,” Krzywicki suggests.

In research environments, teams define their own benchmarks. In commercial settings, those benchmarks are set externally. “Customers bring an incredible level of rigor and discipline,” he continues, “and realizing that even your very best might not be good enough.”

That recalibration forces a shift in mindset. Variability managed in small-scale experiments becomes unacceptable in production environments. “To scale, part of it is building a low-variance process that must be dialed in through work and engineering,” he says.

Nowhere is that precision more relevant than infant nutrition. Checkerspot’s work on High sn-2 Palmitate Algal Oil (OPO) – a human milk fat analog – and its partnership with Huvepharma highlight a category where molecular structure directly affects outcomes. “I’ve always known how important mother’s milk is for infant health,” Krzywicki says, “but it wasn’t until I came here, looked at the data, and understood how important it is, that it fully clicked.”

The ability to replicate that structure through fermentation creates a pathway to narrowing the gap between breast milk and conventional formula.

Krzywicki’s perspective is shaped by time on the investment side and experience scaling a high-growth company. That background informs how he evaluates the broader food-tech landscape. High margins, efficient distribution, defensibility, and large addressable markets define the threshold. “If you look at those four characteristics, I think they all need to be true,” he says.

Many approaches struggle to meet it. “In our space, sometimes the risks are very high, but the potential rewards aren’t nearly large enough to justify them,” he says.

Checkerspot’s model enables partners to better use existing assets with less risk, while bringing its technology to market with less capital

Even with a clear strategy, building the business remains demanding. “A mentor of mine used to say that success tastes like eating gravel,” he says. In reality, progress is incremental, often frustrating, and rarely linear. “Day after day, it’s the same: nose to the grindstone, doing the work, and pushing through what feel like insurmountable obstacles.”

Shaping the future

Checkerspot has moved decisively into execution, focusing on regulatory progress, partner scale-up, and market adoption. “For us, we’re in full-on commercialization mode, getting products through regulatory, into the market, scaled with partners, and ultimately adopted,” he says.

Across the sector, similar transitions are beginning to take hold. Years of development are converging with the realities of deployment. “From where we sit, it feels like we’re on the cusp of a very different way for this industry to operate,” he says.

If that shift materializes, it will favor companies that align technology, economics, and market behavior with precision. Checkerspot’s trajectory points in that direction.
A platform narrowed into a product strategy.  A business model built around existing infrastructure. And a steady progression from possibility to proof.

It is not a dramatic reinvention. It is something more difficult to achieve. A system that works.

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