🚀 2025 AGM Highlight: Checkerspot – Reengineering the Supply Chain with Precision Fermentation
In this vignette, the team at Checkerspot explains how they’re using synthetic biology to design and scale next-gen oils — faster, purer, and closer to home.
Their breakthrough process allows them to recreate fats that are difficult or impossible to source from nature using precision fermentation and microalgae.
Their lead product, OPO, matches a rare fat found in human breast milk — a critical ingredient for infant nutrition. But what drives the business is Checkerspot’s ability to produce high-value, specialty food oils for partners using existing infrastructure and regional supply chains.
By out-licensing innovations rather than building their own factories, Checkerspot brings biomanufacturing to scale with speed and efficiency — transforming how food oils are produced, sourced, and supplied.
📺 Watch the full video to learn how Checkerspot is rewriting the way we grow and deliver performance oils to the world.
J. Casey LippmeierJohn Krzywicki#SynBio#PrecisionFermentation#FoodTech#SupplyChainInnovation#ClimateTech#NextGenOils
There are a number of fats and oils that go into a lot of applications. We focus on the nutrition and food side of the application of our oils and we're specifically. Targeting oils that are difficult to source from nature in some way or another. If you're stuck with conventional sources of oil, you get what you get out of the ground or out of very slow plant breeding techniques that could take decades or hundreds of years to evolve different characteristics in an Organism. With precision fermentation, modern biotechnology, you can get to new characteristics and something in weeks, if not days. We make our oils from a small fermentable microalgae. So one of our lead products that we're developing is called OPO. We can make an exact match. Or a fat found in human breast milk. There's no other ethical supply of that fat on earth. And so we can make that through our technology and then scale it up cost effectively through fermentation. I'm John Krzywicki and I'm the CEO at Checkerspot. I'm Casey Lip Meyer, I'm the CTO at Checkerspot. Instead of waiting 100 years for some random mutation to pop up that is beneficial to us, we'll do it with genetic engineering and synthetic biology. And then once we've developed those products, we out license it to the brands and their suppliers so it could be manufactured. Scale cost effectively using existing assets, cost structures, supply chains, etc. And without us needing to put hundreds of millions of dollars into new capital equipment to go make those products. And so it's a win win. And you'll also see supply chain shift. So instead of having these convoluted supply chains that are really vulnerable to geopolitical issues or tariffs or climate change or what have you, the supply chains are more local and regional in nature and people are supplying closer to home with product that's pure, more reliable and less volatile in terms of. Prices and performance impressed. Milk is best, but improving the health of babies however you can. Not everyone can breastfeed and with that other option there, you want to make it as good as possible. I've got three young kids identical to an 8 year old girls and a five year old boy. The idea that I could leave behind for them something that's better than what I found is incredibly impactful and the greatest thing that I could possibly achieve in professional career.
Thank you Builders VC for the support and opportunity to share our story.