Synonym launches TEA for fermentation to help companies project production costs and accelerate path to market

Synonym has today launched Scaler, described by the company as the first fully interactive, free, online techno-economic analysis (TEA) tool for fermentation that enables companies to project their operating and production costs at commercial scale.

The company's goal with Scaler is to promote the growth of biomanufacturing by making it easier for companies to understand what it will require to build and operate at the scale necessary to bring their bioproducts to the mass market.

“When we launched Synonym last year, it seemed obvious that lots more capacity would need to be built quickly to satisfy the demand for bioproducts,” said Synonym’s Co-founder & CEO Edward Shenderovich. “And the impediment to large capital projects is always financing. With Scaler, we’re creating a framework for the industry to see biomanufacturing facilities as the transformational asset class it is.”

Companies that are looking for a techno-economic analysis for fermentation can now use Scaler to forecast their costs of production at industrial scale at scaler.bio.

Fermentation holds immense potential across many different applications from food to materials and chemicals. To unlock this potential, companies must build long-term plans, including a manufacturing strategy, to accurately forecast their costs of production. But determining commercial-scale manufacturing costs has been a complex and costly challenge that companies in this space have always faced. This is what the folks at Synonym think about every day.

That’s why the company has decided to open up its internal models to the synthetic biology community for free. With Scaler, the goal is to make techno-economic analysis more accessible and enable companies to project their costs of production and operations at commercial scale. With Scaler’s customized output, companies can start setting their commercial roadmaps and manufacturing strategies to understand what it will require to bring their bioproducts to the mass market.

At launch, Scaler supports techno-economic modeling for aerobic, aseptic fermentation processes. Over time, our team plans to add more technologies and molecule types to Scaler, making it the most comprehensive, free TEA tool in the market.

Companies that are looking for a techno-economic analysis for fermentation can now use Scaler to model their costs of building a commercial-scale facility and producing at industrial-scale.

Users can refine over 50 parameters in their models, including variables related to fermentation, feedstock, media, downstream processing, financing assumptions and more. After providing these inputs, users receive a customized report with key insights about their process, including: CapEx and COGS breakdown; sensitivity analysis; bankability analysis; co-location analysis; facility sizing matrix; and much more.

Synonym is accelerating the world’s biological future by designing, developing and managing commercial-scale biomanufacturing facilities for startups to Fortune 500 companies. The company built Capacitor.bio last year to catalog all existing fermentation capacity and it’s quickly become the most comprehensive directory in the world.

But the obvious conclusion it took away from building Capacitor is that there simply isn’t enough existing capacity. New capacity is expensive, and if we need hundreds of billions of investment to bring new facilities online, we’ll also need to tap into new capital sources. Large-scale biomanufacturing infrastructure will require benchmarks and underwriting that don’t yet exist in synthetic biology. If we’re going to create a new asset class in biomanufacturing infrastructure, we think a framework like Scaler’s is a good place to start.

Scaler is built to help companies of all sizes and ages understand the key metrics and milestones necessary to succeed at the industrial scale and how operational, technical and financial decisions may impact commercial success. This is the data capital providers need to feel comfortable allocating toward a new asset class.

Together, Capacitor and Scaler provide the synthetic biology ecosystem with a powerful, accessible suite of tools to guide companies along their biomanufacturing scale up journey.