Industrial biotechnology · Fats and oils
C16 Biosciences
A New York company that brews a palm oil substitute in yeast rather than growing it on cleared rainforest. Five ingredients are sold commercially, four for beauty and one, announced in July 2026, for food.
A stack of masks
In July 2013 Shara Ticku boarded a flight to Singapore for work and her employer handed her a stack of N95 masks. She did not take the precaution seriously until the plane doors opened.
“I land in Singapore, and the air quality index is over 400. Air quality index: anything over 300 is considered super toxic.” Schools were closed. Pregnant women were told to stay indoors.
She asked what was burning. The answer was two words: palm oil. Operators in Indonesia and Malaysia were clearing rainforest and peatland by fire. This happened every year, her colleagues said.
Accounts differ: Atmos in 2019 dated the haze to June and put Ticku on a maternal health project, while later ones place her at Goldman Sachs in July.
Why the tree is hard to beat
Palm oil sits in roughly half the products on a supermarket shelf, from ice cream and baby formula to shampoo and lipstick. It is close to odorless, solid at room temperature, liquid at body temperature, stable under heat, and cheap. It is also the most efficient oil crop on earth, about 3.06 tonnes per hectare, four times sunflower and seven times soybean.
That efficiency is the trap. Oil palm only grows near the equator, where tropical forest stands. Market estimates run from $53.1 billion for 2022 to about $70 billion in reports by the Financial Times and Ambrook.
The industry built its own fix, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, which certifies roughly a fifth of supply. A 2020 study cited by Ambrook found 75 percent of certified Indonesian and Malaysian plantations sat on land cleared within the previous 30 years. Ticku is blunt: “It’s nearly impossible to prove that the palm oil in this product didn’t come from land which was engaged in deforestation.”
Three classmates and a deadline
In 2016, three students in an MIT Media Lab class called Revolutionary Ventures were two weeks from a business plan deadline and out of ideas: David Heller, an MIT undergraduate in biological engineering, Harry McNamara, a doctoral candidate in health sciences and technology, and Ticku, at Harvard Business School.
She told the Singapore story. It pulled a memory out of McNamara, who had flown over rows of oil palm carved into jungle in Costa Rica. The three had been to the Impossible Burger launch in New York that January, and the question wrote itself: if biotechnology can replace meat, why not palm oil.
The first money was a $1,000 MIT grant, then the MIT $100K competition and the Sandbox Innovation Fund. By 2018 the team had made a few milliliters of oil. The name points at palmitic acid, the sixteen carbon fat at the backbone of palm oil.
From flask to fifty thousand liters
Y Combinator took the company into its Summer 2018 batch. “We raised $4 million in a two-week period on the back of that,” Ticku told BeautyMatter. The Form D filed that November records $3,965,000 sold to 33 investors.
On March 2, 2020 came a $20 million Series A led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the climate fund founded by Bill Gates. Four months later the Department of Energy named C16 one of eight Agile BioFoundry projects, pairing it with Pacific Northwest and Sandia National Laboratories to engineer fatty acid synthesis in Rhodosporidium toruloides. That is the only public record naming the organism.
In November 2022 C16 completed its first 50,000 liter fermentation and launched a brand, Palmless. On March 1, 2023 it shipped Save the F#$%ing Rainforest Nourishing Oil, $45 for 120 ml, packaged like a protest poster. A soap bar with Pangaia and Haeckels followed at Selfridges.
January 2024 brought a $3.5 million Gates Foundation grant over three years and $1 million from Elemental Excelerator earmarked for FDA GRAS work. By late 2025 an independent report counted six cosmetics brands launching with torula oil that year, among them a cleanser from NIOD, an Estée Lauder Companies brand.
The food question
In July 2026 C16 announced five commercial ingredients. The fifth is a cocoa butter equivalent, its first for food, launched into a market where cocoa butter costs reportedly rose sixfold during 2025. The company says “multiple multinational food manufacturers” are using it in product development.
What has not been announced is the regulatory step. In November 2022 CNBC reported the company had not applied to the FDA for food use. In October 2023 the Financial Times reported that no precision fermentation palm oil product had been approved for human consumption anywhere. The Elemental money was raised to close that gap. Nearly three years on, no completed GRAS notice has been announced.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| SEC Form D filings | Three offerings under CIK 0001757728. Nov 2018: $3,965,000 sold of $4,000,000, 33 investors. Mar 2020: $19,999,994 sold of $19,999,994, 45 investors. Mar 2023: $4,984,415 sold of $10,244,013, 17 investors. Nothing filed since. | Public record |
| Department of Energy | July 10, 2020: C16 named among eight Agile BioFoundry projects, working with Pacific Northwest and Sandia National Laboratories on fatty acid synthesis in Rhodosporidium toruloides. The DOE money goes to the laboratories, not the company. | Public record |
| Grants and papers | No NIH RePORTER project, no NSF award and no PubMed paper carrying a C16 Biosciences affiliation as of Sep 22, 2026. The Gates grant is philanthropic, not federal. | Not found |
| Torula oil efficacy | A July 2026 company data package reports in vitro DPPH radical scavenging above vitamin C, beta-carotene and astaxanthin, tested by Oxford Biosciences in May 2026, and a profile of 31.4 percent palmitic and 10.2 percent oleic acid. Announced in a release, not a journal. | Company-stated |
| Named customers | Tower 28, NIOD from the Estée Lauder Companies, KraveBeauty, iota, and the REWILD Body Block with Pangaia and Haeckels. | Independent |
| Production scale | First 50,000 liter fermentation in 2022. In 2026 the company says its New York facility makes hundreds of tonnes a year, “orders of magnitude above” peers. A March 2023 Fast Company visit placed the tank “in an unspecified location somewhere in North America”. One trade report calls the volumes unverified. | Accounts differ |
| Food regulatory status | Not applied to FDA for food use as of Nov 2022. $1 million raised in Oct 2023 to pursue GRAS. Cocoa butter equivalent launched July 2026. No completed GRAS notice announced. | Not found |
| Total raised | The 2020 release said $24 million. A January 2024 trade report said $34 million. An Unreasonable Group profile still read $24 million on Sep 22, 2026. Form D equity sold totals $28,949,409. | Figures differ |
Read plainly: the money, the federal laboratory work and the retail shelf are documented. The science is not. There is no peer-reviewed paper, the antioxidant data comes from a commissioned assay, and the production volume rests on the company’s word. The strongest independent evidence is commercial, and it is real: prestige brands, one owned by Estée Lauder, put the ingredient in products people can buy.
What to watch
- A GRAS notice for the cocoa butter equivalent. Without it the food business stays in product development.
- A new Form D. The last, filed March 22, 2023, left $5,259,598 of a $10.2 million offering unsold.
- Named food customers, and any tonnage or revenue behind the hundreds of tonnes claim.
- Price. Every independent analyst quoted since 2019 calls parity with commodity palm oil the unsolved problem.
In their words
“I land in Singapore, and the air quality index is over 400. Air quality index: anything over 300 is considered super toxic.”
Shara Ticku, co-founder and CEO, CNBC, 2022 · Independent
“Everyone knows the way we produce this stuff is terrible. But I don’t expect people to change their behavior just because we know palm oil is bad.”
Shara Ticku, Atmos, 2019 · Independent
“That land conversion process has been emitting something like a gigaton of CO2 per year, just for the expansion of palm oil.”
David Heller, co-founder and COO, MIT News, 2023 · Independent
“With precision fermentation, you can create novel profiles. So we create novel carotenoids that come from our yeast,”
Shara Ticku, Ambrook, 2025 · Independent
“You have to be at parity with other oils because consumers do not want to see the price of their food basket go through the roof for a sustainable alternative,”
Chris Chuck, University of Bath, Financial Times, 2023 · Independent
“Maybe in 50 years, there might be. But where’s the population at that point? Your only alternative now is to ensure that it is grown sustainably.”
Judith Murdoch, palm oil consultant, Ambrook, 2025 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, C16 Biosciences, Inc., CIK 0001757728
- Public recordForm D and Form D/A
- Public recordDOE selects new biomanufacturing projects
- Public recordNIH RePORTER, NSF and PubMed queries
- IndependentA clean alternative to one of the world’s most common ingredients
- IndependentPalm oil is in almost everything, and it’s devastating rainforests
- IndependentThe Palm Oil Apocalypse
- IndependentCan Palm Oil Ever Be Replaced? And Should It?
- IndependentPrecision fermentation start-ups pursue palm oil alternatives
- InterviewSolving the Industry’s Palm Oil Problem and Beyond
- IndependentThe company behind this bottle wants to upend the palm oil business
- IndependentC16 unveils precision-fermented cocoa butter
- IndependentC16 launches yeast-based cocoa butter
- CompanyC16 Biosciences raises $20 million Series A
- CompanyC16 ramps up in food fueled by fresh funding
- CompanyPalmless unveils efficacy data for Torula Oil
- CompanyPalmless launches first food ingredient
- PartnerC16 Biosciences venture profile
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
