Industrial biotechnology · Environmental remediation
BluumBio
A four-person Berkeley company making microbial products that eat industrial pollution. One product is on sale, three are coming soon, and the hardest target, PFAS, is still in the lab on a federal Phase I grant.
A bag of powder and a garden sprayer
The instructions for BluumBio’s first commercial product read like a recipe. Add 500 grams of powder to 12 gallons of water. Each gallon covers about 300 square feet. Mix it by hand in a bucket, pour it into a sprayer you can buy anywhere, and for anything over an acre, load it into a sprayer truck or a drip line. Apply twice in the first year, once a year after.
In the bag is a freeze-dried soil bacterium, Bacillus megaterium, mixed with powdered nutrients and electron donors. The product is Bluum Helios, aimed at petroleum hydrocarbons: former refineries, oil spills, old manufactured gas plants.
The ambition is larger. Three more products are named on the site: Bluum Delta for PFAS, Bluum Firefly for PCBs, Bluum Maris for plastics. All three carry the same line: product coming soon.
The problem the powder is aimed at
Remediation today mostly means moving dirt: dig it up, stabilise it in place, inject chemicals, or heat it. The summary for BluumBio’s own NIH grant is blunt about what that leaves behind. Current approaches for soil remediation include PFAS stabilization and soil removal, the agency notes, and neither of these existing approaches permanently destroy PFAS.
The scale is national. That grant summary puts an estimated 20 million acres of US agricultural land under PFAS impact, mostly from biosolid fertiliser and contaminated irrigation water. In April 2024 the EPA finalised the first enforceable drinking water limits for PFOA and PFOS. In May 2025 it kept those two limits, proposed pushing compliance from 2029 to 2031, and said it intended to rescind the regulations for PFHxS, PFNA, GenX and the hazard index mixture. The rules are moving. The liability is not.
Biology is the obvious counter-proposal and the hardest one. PFAS persist because of the carbon to fluorine bond, and organisms that break it are rare. When a rival firm launched in 2020, a Princeton engineering professor told Chemical & Engineering News he had found the ability in one strain of iron-reducing anaerobic bacteria, and that the breakdown was slow and incomplete.
An archaeologist who became a microbiologist
Katherine French did an MPhil in Environmental Archaeology at Trinity College, Oxford, then a DPhil in Plant Sciences, then lectured in biology at Wadham. She had planned to be a professor. Two postdocs, at UC Berkeley and the Joint BioEnergy Institute, sent her somewhere else.
The turn came from a rejection. She had been building bacteria that could eat crude oil, and the grant committees kept telling her the same thing: her research was too applied. So she stopped asking for grants and started selling a product.
She applied to Y Combinator in 2021 while working at Berkeley Lab, and YC made her quit to join. The company was incorporated that year. In 2022 she became an Activate fellow at Cyclotron Road, the entrepreneurship programme embedded at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Alaska, then a mining company
The first field result the company talks about came from Alaska. In a 2023 investor interview French said 67 percent of the oil in the soil broke down in one month, against a natural background rate she put at under 1 percent a year. No report, dataset or third-party verification has been published.
The second turn was corporate. In October 2024 Founders Factory and Rio Tinto named BluumBio to the first cohort of their Mining Tech Accelerator, into which Rio Tinto had committed A$14.4 million, about US$9.7 million, over three years. Six companies were chosen. Each received seed capital, four months of support, and the prospect of Rio Tinto as a first customer.
In May 2025 EQT Foundation announced it had joined the company’s seed round. Two months later the NIH made its first award.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Federal grant | NIH NIEHS SBIR Phase I, R43ES037574, $188,466, through the Superfund Research Program. Jul 18, 2025 to Jun 30, 2026. Project leader Katherine French. Laboratory treatability studies on PFAS-impacted soil, to inform future field trials. | Public record |
| Federal contracts | USAspending returns no contract awards for 2020 to 2026. No Department of Defense SBIR, SERDP or ESTCP award naming the company was found, and no work on TNT or other explosives appears in the record. | Not found |
| Patents | Five published applications, applicant BluumBio, Inc. Three cover variant cytochrome P450 monooxygenases, priority Apr 20, 2023 (US 2024/0352431, WO 2024/220320, AU 2024257176). Two cover defluorinating enzymes for PFAS (US 2025/0065383, WO 2026/161785). Inventors Katherine French and Jordan Baker. None granted. | Public record |
| Peer-reviewed papers | No publications attributed to the company were found in PubMed as of Sep 23, 2026. | Not found |
| Alaska field trial | 67 percent of soil oil degraded in one month, stated by the founder in a September 2023 investor interview. No site, client, sample count or report. | Company-stated |
| Product performance | 70 to 99 percent breakdown in as little as 2 days for wastewater and 28 days for soil, across three product lines. Stated in EQT Foundation’s May 2025 announcement. No underlying data published. | Investor-stated |
| Engineered or natural | Y Combinator’s listing says the company makes bacteria and plants that clean up pollution. EQT’s announcement says the platform uses naturally occurring organisms. The patents describe host cells engineered to express recombinant enzymes. The shipping product is described only as a freeze-dried soil bacterium. | Sources disagree |
| Database size | EQT’s May 2025 announcement says the BioDegra database holds over 2,000 genomes. EQT’s own ThinQ page says over 12,000 genomes and 3,000 genes. | Sources disagree |
| Environmental release approvals | No USDA APHIS biotechnology permit or notification, and no EPA TSCA microbial submission, naming the company was found. | Not found |
| Customers | Paid pilots described as underway by EQT Foundation in May 2025. No customer has been named by anyone. | Investor-stated |
| SEC filings | EDGAR full-text search returns zero hits in any form, including Form D. | Public record |
Read plainly: the verifiable record is a patent portfolio, one federal grant and a place in a mining accelerator. Every performance number, from the Alaska result to the 70 to 99 percent range, rests on the company or its investor saying so. The two internal disagreements matter differently. Whether the organisms are engineered or wild decides which regulator must clear a field release. The genome count, given twice by the same investor with a sixfold gap, is a reason to treat platform numbers as marketing until someone publishes.
What to watch
- An SBIR Phase II for R43ES037574. Phase I ended June 30, 2026, and Phase II is where treatability work becomes field work.
- The first named customer. Paid pilots have been asserted since May 2025 with no site or client attached.
- Any USDA APHIS or EPA filing for an engineered organism. Nothing has appeared, which suggests what is sprayed today is not a regulated article.
- A first granted patent. Five applications are published and pending; none has issued.
- Published field data that a third party can check.
In their words
“I came to UC Berkeley as a postdoc in 2018 and was working on a project to develop new bioremediation approaches to clean up a former oil refinery in Bay Point, CA.”
Katherine French, founder and CEO, Oxonian Ventures, 2023 · Interview
“Feedback from the funders I had applied to said that my research was too applied.”
Katherine French, EnSpire Oxford, July 2023 · Interview
“In summer field trials in Alaska, we saw 67% of the oil in the soil was broken down in one month.”
Katherine French, Oxonian Ventures, September 2023 · Company-stated
“Our microbes break down industrial chemicals into CO2 and water, leaving nothing behind.”
Katherine French, Shared Future Fund Q&A, September 2024 · Company-stated
“Bluum is often a subcontractor to these firms.”
Katherine French on working under engineering firms such as AECOM and ERM, Shared Future Fund, 2024 · Company-stated
“There is a more established start-up in a similar space to BLUUMBIO and there's a feeling of being neck-and-neck with them.”
Katherine French, EnSpire Oxford, July 2023 · Interview
“The scientific breakthroughs of the BluumBio team has made it possible to productify soil health and clean waters.”
Cilia Holmes Indahl, CEO, EQT Foundation, May 2025 announcement · Investor release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordNIH RePORTER and NIEHS Superfund Research Program, R43ES037574
- Public recordUSAspending award search, BluumBio
- Public recordSEC EDGAR full-text search, BluumBio
- Public recordWIPO PATENTSCOPE applicant search, 5 results
- Public recordEPA keeps maximum contaminant levels for PFOA, PFOS
- IndependentMeet the Rio Tinto backed startups set to decarbonize and transform mining
- IndependentRio Tinto backs six mining tech startups
- IndependentFounders Factory and Rio Tinto to support six technology startups
- IndependentBeyond extraction: 6 mining tech startups
- IndependentAllonnia launches to destroy pollution with microbes
- InterviewKatherine French, founder and CEO of BLUUMBIO
- InterviewMeet Katherine French, CEO and Founder of BluumBio
- InterviewA Q&A with Katherine of BluumBio
- IndependentCyclotron Road announces 2022 cohort
- IndependentBluumBio company profile, funding and investors
- IndependentBluumBio funding rounds and list of investors
- InvestorEQT Foundation invests in BluumBio, harnessing the power of nature to clean up pollution
- InvestorBluumBio portfolio page and Harnessing nature
- CompanyBluumBio product and store pages
- CompanyBLUUMBIO company listing and founder bio
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
