Amyris, Inc. is a leading integrated industrial biotechnology company that
is applying its technology platform to engineer, manufacture and sell high performance,
low cost products into the Health and Nutrition, Personal Care and Performance
Materials markets. Our proven technology platform allows us to rapidly engineer
microbes and use them as catalysts to metabolize renewable, plant-sourced sugars
into large volume, high-value ingredients. Our biotechnology platform and industrial
fermentation process replaces existing complex and expensive chemical manufacturing
processes. We 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, animal- or plant-derived ingredients. We continue to build demand
for our current portfolio of products through a sales network comprised of direct
sales and distributors, and are engaged in collaborations across each of our
three market focus areas to drive additional product sales and partnership opportunities.
Via our partnership model, we co-invest in the development of each molecule
to bring it from the lab to commercial scale and then capture long term revenue
either via the sale of the molecule to the partner and/or value sharing of end
product sales.
Amyris was founded in 2003 in the San Francisco Bay Area by a group of scientists
from the University of California, Berkeley. Our first major milestone came
in 2005 when, through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
we developed technology capable of creating microbial strains that produce artemisinic
acid - a precursor of artemisinin, an effective anti-malarial drug. In 2008,
we granted royalty-free licenses to allow Sanofi-Aventis (Sanofi) to produce
artemisinic acid using our technology. Building on our success with artemisinic
acid, in 2007 we began applying our technology platform to develop, manufacture
and sell sustainable alternatives to a broad range of markets.
We focused our initial development efforts primarily on the production of Biofene®,
our brand of renewable farnesene, a long-chain, branched hydrocarbon molecule
that we manufacture through fermentation using engineered microbes. Our farnesene
derivatives are sold in hundreds of products as nutraceuticals, skin care, fragrances,
solvents, polymers, and lubricants ingredients. The commercialization of farnesene
pushed us to create a more cost efficient, faster and accurate development process
in the lab and drive costs out of our Brotas, Brazil production facility. This
investment has enabled our technology platform to rapidly develop microbial
strains and commercialize target molecules. In 2014, we began manufacturing
additional molecules for the flavors and fragrance (F&F) industry, in 2015
we began investing to expand our capabilities to other small molecule chemical
classes beyond terpenes via our collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research
Project Agency (DARPA), as discussed below, and in 2016 we expanded into proteins.
Since inception, we have received equity and debt financing from investors including
affiliates of Total S.A. (collectively referred to as Total), the international
energy company, and affiliates of Temasek Holdings (Private) Limited, the Singapore
sovereign wealth fund (collectively referred to as Temasek), and various venture
capital and private equity investors. Our common stock is traded on The NASDAQ
Stock Market (NASDAQ) under the symbol AMRS.
Amyris has invested over $500 million in infrastructure and technology to create
microbes that produce chemicals from sugar or other feedstocks at commercial
scale. This platform has been used to design, build, optimize, and upscale strains
producing 5 distinct molecules, leading to more than 15 commercial products
used in 500 consumer products. Our time to market for molecules has decreased
from 7 years to less than a year for our most recent molecule, mainly due to
our ability to leverage the technology platform we have built.
Our technology platform has been in active use since 2008, and has been integrated
with our commercial production since 2011, creating a seamless organism development
process that we believe makes Amyris an industry leader in the successful scale-up
of small molecules. The key performance characteristics of our platform that
we believe differentiate Amyris include our proprietary computational tools,
strain construction tools, screening and analytics tools, and advanced lab automation
and data integration. Our state-of-the-art infrastructure includes industry
leading strain engineering and lab automation located in Emeryville, CA, pilot
scale production facilities in Emeryville, CA and Campinas, Brazil, a demonstration
scale facility in Campinas, Brazil and a commercial scale production facility
in Brotas, Brazil.
We are able to use a wide variety of feedstocks for production, but have focused
on accessing Brazilian sugarcane for our large-scale production because of its
renewability, low cost and relative price stability. We have also successfully
used other feedstocks such as sugar beets, corn dextrose, sweet sorghum and
cellulosic sugars at various manufacturing facilities.
We are currently producing three molecules at our Brotas, Brazil plant: farnesene
and two fragrance molecules.
Our mission is to apply innovative science to deliver sustainable solutions
for a growing world. We seek to become the worlds 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 our technology, leading consumer brands can develop products
made from renewable sources that offer equivalent or better performance and
stable supply with competitive pricing. We call this our No Compromise®
value proposition. We aim to improve the world one molecule at a time by providing
the best alternatives to the products the world relies on every day.
We have developed and are operating our company under a business model that
generates cash from collaborations, from product sales, and value share. We
believe this combination will enable us to realize our vision of becoming the
world’s leading renewable products company.
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