Breaking, a plastic degradation and synthetic biology company secures $10.5million in seed funding. The backers were kept a secret.
The company plans to use the money to grow both its R&D department and its operations. Breaking is a synthetic biology and plastic degradation company that was co-founded by Sukanya Punthambaker, Vaskar Gnyawali, George Church, Don Ingber, Alba Tull, Kent Wakeford, and Ben Lamm. It was developed at Colossal Biosciences on the basis of a key discovery from the Harvard University Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
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The announcement of their discovery, X-32, which they plan to develop to alleviate the worldwide plastics epidemic, marked the beginning of it. In as little as 22 months, X-32 in its natural state can break down polyolefins, polyesters, and polyamides, leaving behind carbon dioxide, water, and biomass.
Jim Kim, General Partner of Builders VC, and a lead investor in Breaking said, “Breaking is solving one of the biggest problems on our planet. They are using the natural world as inspiration and layering on cutting edge technology to transform how we break down plastics, This is going to be one of the biggest breakthroughs of the decade and I’m excited to be part of it.”
Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., Founding Director and Core Faculty of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University said, “We are excited to see how Colossal Biosciences has enabled our novel discovery to break away from its competitors in the plastic remediation space by developing a bioinspired technology that can degrade many types of plastics that are threatening our environment. This can be accomplished without pretreatment and the breakdown products could be used to produce other valuable materials and commodities. This is what sets Breaking apart from the field,” , the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Bioinspired Engineering at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences.
Breaking co-founder and Colossal CEO Ben Lamm said, “We could not be more thrilled to launch Breaking from stealth from Colossal. The technologies co-developed by the Wyss Institute provide limitless applications to address our planet’s pervasive plastic contamination challenges, Part of our core mission of ecosystem restoration at Colossal can only be achieved with the removal of plastic that plague our ecosystems and negatively impact biodiversity.”
About Breaking
Breaking is a plastic degradation company gestated at Colossal Biosciences that uses synthetic biology. Its flagship product, X-32 was discovered in 2022 at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. Co-founded by Sukanya Punthambaker, Vaskar Gnyawali, George Church, Don Ingber, Alba Tull, Kent Wakeford, and Ben Lamm
