Consider the room you are sitting in: From the injection-molded plastic of a computer mouse to the synthetic carpet fibers on the floor, you are surrounded by petroleum-derived products in your daily life. But what if there is a better way to produce the products we depend on with cleaner and greener materials? Biomanufacturing offers a way to use materials from nature to create the items we use every day.

Checkerspot, a materials innovation company, is rethinking products from a molecular level. It is optimizing microbes to biomanufacture unique structural oils found in nature. The company has taken the technology it has built and turned it into a platform to bring us closer to a post-petroleum future.