Amyris, Inc. (AMRS) is a leading industrial biotechnology company that is applying its technology platform to engineer, manufacture and sell high performance products into the Health and Nutrition, Personal Care and Performance Materials markets. Its proven technology platform allows it to rapidly engineer microbes and use them as catalysts to metabolize renewable, plant-sourced sugars into large volume, high-value ingredients. Its biotechnology platform and industrial fermentation process replace existing complex and expensive chemical manufacturing processes. The Company has successfully used its technology to develop and produce at commercial volumes five distinct molecules.

The company believe industrial synthetic biology represents a third industrial revolution, bringing together biology and engineering to generate new, more sustainable materials to meet the growing global demand for bio-based replacements for petroleum, and animal- or plant-derived ingredients. The company continue to build demand for its current portfolio of products through a sales network comprised of direct sales and distributors, and are engaged in collaborations across each of its three market focus areas to drive additional product sales and partnership opportunities. Via its partnership model, its partners invest in the development of each molecule to bring it from the lab to commercial scale. The company then capture long term revenue both through the production and sale of the molecule to its partners and through value sharing of its partners' product sales.

Amyris was founded in 2003 in the San Francisco Bay area by a group of scientists from the University of California, Berkeley. Its first major milestone came in 2005 when, through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The company developed technology capable of creating microbial strains that produce artemisinic acid - a precursor of artemisinin, an effective anti-malarial drug. In 2008, The company granted royalty-free licenses to allow Sanofi-Aventis (Sanofi) to produce artemisinic acid using its technology. Building on its success with artemisinic acid, in 2007 it began applying its technology platform to develop, manufacture and sell sustainable alternatives to a broad range of markets.

Biofene

The company focused its initial development efforts primarily on the production of Biofene®, its brand of renewable farnesene, a long-chain, branched hydrocarbon molecule that it manufacture through fermentation using engineered microbes. Its farnesene derivatives are sold in hundreds of products as nutraceuticals, skin care products, fragrances, solvents, polymers, and lubricant ingredients. The commercialization of farnesene pushed it to create a more cost efficient, faster and accurate development process in the lab and drive costs out of its Brotas, Brazil production facility. This investment has enabled its technology platform to rapidly develop microbial strains and commercialize target molecules. In 2014, The company began manufacturing additional molecules for the flavors and fragrance (F&F) industry; in 2015 it began investing to expand its capabilities to other small molecule chemical classes beyond terpenes via its collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), and in 2016 it expanded into proteins.

The company have invested over $500 million in infrastructure and technology to create microbes that produce molecules from sugar or other feedstocks at commercial scale. This platform has been used to design, build, optimize, and upscale strains producing five distinct molecules, leading to more than 15 commercial products used in over 500 consumer products. The company's time to market for molecules has decreased from seven years to less than a year for its most recent molecule, mainly due to its ability to leverage the technology platform it have built.

Its technology platform has been in active use since 2008, and has been integrated with its commercial production since 2011, creating a seamless organism development process that it believe makes Amyris an industry leader in the successful scale-up and commercialization of biotech produced molecules. The key performance characteristics of its platform that it believe differentiate Amyris include its proprietary computational tools, strain construction tools, screening and analytics tools, and advanced lab automation and data integration. Its state-of-the-art infrastructure includes industry leading strain engineering and lab automation located in Emeryville, California, pilot scale production facilities in Emeryville, California and Campinas, Brazil, a demonstration-scale facility in Campinas, Brazil and a commercial-scale production facility in Brotas, Brazil.

The company is able to use a wide variety of feedstocks for production, but have focused on accessing Brazilian sugarcane for its large-scale production because of its renewability, low cost and relative price stability. The company have also successfully used other feedstocks such as sugar beets, corn dextrose, sweet sorghum and cellulosic sugars at various manufacturing facilities.

Its mission is to apply innovative science to deliver sustainable solutions for a growing world. The company seek to become the world's leading provider of renewable, high-performance alternatives to non-renewable and scarce products. In the past, choosing a renewable product often required producers to compromise on performance or price. With its technology, leading consumer brands can develop products made from renewable sources that offer equivalent or better performance and stable supply with competitive pricing. The company call this No Compromise® value proposition. The company aim to improve the world one molecule at a time by providing the best alternatives to the products the world relies on every day.