Oakbio

About Oakbio

Oakbio, Inc., founded in 2009 by Brian Sefton and Pierre Pujol, operates at the intersection of biotechnology and industrial sustainability. The company has positioned itself as a carbon capture and utilization entity, focusing on the conversion of waste carbon streams into valuable commercial products. Its core technology revolves around a proprietary platform that utilizes engineered microbes within bioreactors to transform carbon dioxide, sourced from industrial flue gas and other waste streams, into a range of marketable goods.

The company's product portfolio is diverse, including chemical feedstocks, biofuels, PHA bioplastics, and animal feed. A significant output is biobutanol, an 87-octane compatible biofuel, produced directly from flue gas. Beyond fuels, Oakbio has successfully produced biodegradable plastics, demonstrating a process that yields over 50% bioplastics by dry weight from the microbe biomass. This process was notably tested on-site at the Lehigh Southwest Cement Company plant, using the plant's exhaust as a direct feedstock. In 2015, the company announced the development of a novel E. coli-based microbe model to produce n-Butanol from a wider array of feedstocks, including agricultural and municipal waste.

Operating under the brand name NovoNutrients, Oakbio has also made significant strides in the aquaculture market. This initiative, spearheaded by CEO David Tze who joined after extensive experience in aquaculture seed funding, focuses on converting industrial CO2 into a high-protein feed ingredient called Novomeal. This product is designed to be a sustainable, non-GMO alternative to traditional fishmeal, addressing the issue of overfishing while providing a nutritionally complete protein source for farmed fish. The company's technology in this vertical uses patent-pending microbial consortia that thrive on untreated industrial waste gases from sources like cement plants and oil refineries.

From a funding perspective, Oakbio has navigated several rounds, including a grant of $54.5K in April 2017 from investors like the European Innovation Council and a seed round in July 2018 with participation from SOSV and IndieBio. The company has been noted as deadpooled, and in July 2025, it was announced that there would be an online auction for its assets. The company's primary inventors, Brian Sefton and William J. Coleman, have secured multiple patents for its core technologies, covering methods for biochemical production, bioreactor design, and microbial biomass-based feed products.