Basecamp Research: Bridging biodiversity and biotech to power the bio-economy.
While biodiversity loss accelerates, less than 1% of proteins in nature have been discovered.
Combining field collection, a knowledge graph of nature-derived proteins, and machine learning techniques, Basecamp Research is building the world’s largest protein database to enable protein discovery and drive the low-carbon bio-economy. Their database can predict not only a protein’s function but also its structure, which helps accelerate real-world product innovation in pharmaceuticals, food, and materials. Basecamp Research’s technology helps move us away from petrochemicals as the basis of our products, and toward more sustainable solutions using biology as the basis. The company has already increased the number of proteins known to science by 50 percent.
The team has collected thousands of samples from 40 percent of Earth’s biomes, establishing partnerships with biodiversity hotspots across 18 countries. Focused on biodiversity restoration, Basecamp Research shares a portion of royalties from commercialized products back to local land stewards.
Q & A with Basecamp Research
- What motivated you to found your company?
To date, we have explored less than one percent of all the biodiversity on our planet; of that, we understand an even smaller fraction. This has created a bottleneck for product development in biotechnology companies, meaning only a small number of products can be economically made with biology despite the potential of this industry to move us away from petrochemicals towards more sustainable solutions. With backgrounds in biochemistry, engineering, and expedition science (being the first team to conduct fully off-grid DNA sequencing in a polar environment) we founded Basecamp Research to combine true global exploration of biodiversity with the latest computational AI advances to solve this problem and allow a new generation of biological products to be made.
- Why did you choose to partner with Valo?
We have been impressed with the quality of the Valo mission since the first meeting – to leverage technology to drive positive climate impact. With biodiversity being one of the most important pillars of climate, we are proud to have Valo join our journey to build a long-term value chain between biotechnology and biodiversity, thereby incentivizing its protection. We've always valued investors who are passionate about engaging with hard topics in a hands-on manner, and this is exactly what we have found in the team at Valo.
