We are engineering photosynthesizing bacteria and cascading their enzymatic outputs for low-cost, scalable, and carbon-negative polymer manufacturing. We want to take in tons of CO2 to help reverse climate change while also working to decarbonize supply chains, so carbon capture becomes redundant in the first place.

We have engineered the fastest photosynthesizing organism in the world with CRISPR and use generative models to design our enzymatic cascades. We are stating with starch as the quintessential polymer but will expand to other verticals soon.
Scalable, carbon-negative polymer manufacturing.
Title: Anthrogen: We make large molecules like fuels and plastics from the air. | Y Combinator

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Anthrogen: We make large molecules like fuels and plastics from the air. | Y Combinator
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Anthrogen
=========

We make large molecules like fuels and plastics from the air.

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### We make large molecules like fuels and plastics from the air.

Anthrogen uses genetically modified bacteria and optimized enzymes to turn carbon from the air into cheap chemicals. Think Solugen but for larger, more complex molecules and using atmospheric carbon instead of sugar as a base. We have engineered the fastest photosynthesizing organism in the world with CRISPR and use generative models to design our enzymatic cascades. We are stating with jet/rocket fuel but will expand to other verticals soon.



Anthrogen

Founded:2024

Team Size:3

Location:New York

Group Partner:[Gustaf Alstromer](

 []( "LinkedIn profile") []( "Twitter account")

### Active Founders

### Ankit Singhal, Founder

Ankit is the CEO of Anthrogen. He was a Science Research Fellow and Named Scholar at Columbia (a designation reserved for the top ~10 STEM research students in each class). He has worked in both wet labs and computational labs (focusing on catalysis and structural biology/biophysics) for years. He published several first-author papers as early as high school, won and led national teams at international science/research competitions – he’s excited to lead Anthrogen’s damp lab approach.



Ankit Singhal

[Anthrogen](

 []( "LinkedIn profile")

### Vignesh Karthik, Founder

Vignesh is the COO of Anthrogen. As a student at Columbia Engineering, he studied Applied Math with a focus on Geology before dropping out after his sophomore year. He has been working in data science and geology since early high school, beginning with his research at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. Shortly after he was recruited as a freshman to work for Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the worlds leading Earth Institute. Before dropping out he also worked as an Entrepreneurship Fellow.



Vignesh Karthik

[Anthrogen](

 []( "Twitter account") []( "LinkedIn profile")

### Connor Lee, Founder

Connor is the CTO of Anthrogen. Before dropping out of Columbia as a sophomore, he was a researcher in Columbia's ROAM Lab and was the youngest ever Columbia Robotics president. He also placed 3rd Internationally for FRC and top 5 internationally for MATE ROV after over a decade of robotics experience.



Connor Lee

[Anthrogen](

 []( "LinkedIn profile")

### Company Launches

[### Anthrogen 🧪 Scalable, carbon-negative polymer manufacturing](

**tl;dr** We are engineering photosynthesizing bacteria and cascading their enzymatic outputs for low-cost, scalable, and carbon-negative polymer manufacturing. We want to take in tons of CO2 to help reverse climate change while also working to decarbonize supply chains, so carbon capture becomes redundant in the first place.  
  
—

Hey everyone! We’re Connor, Vignesh, and Ankit – the cofounders of [Anthrogen]( (formerly Arctic Capture). This is actually our second Launch YC post of the batch (first one [here]( under the name Arctic Capture) – we decided we needed a relaunch/rebrand.

In our first launch we promised carbon capture with genetically engineered bacteria. In this one, we are happy to tell you that we have exceeded what we originally thought was possible at the beginning of the summer; we’re not just focused on bacterial carbon capture but also on recombinant protein expression and generative protein models – all coming together under a single unified platform.

**Polymers are everywhere, we are not very good at creating them sustainably. Current carbon dioxide removal technologies are expensive and/or inefficient.**

From plastics to fuels to foods to fabrics to carbon stores – every facet of our lives is defined by polymers. Publicly traded companies live and die by the prices of these carbon chains and with the price of crude oil, inefficient catalytic processes, looming threats of legislation/public pressure around carbon emissions, these companies worth _trillions_ of dollars are in a precarious position. We need a way to produce polymers cheaper, sustainably. Solugen became a $2b startup in 5 years by using sugar instead of oil as a base of these reactions – is there another source of carbon we can use instead?

Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) technologies are also prohibitively expensive – current high-quality solutions still cost \>$1000 per ton of CO2 capture. With more than two-thirds of the Fortune 500 pledging net-zero goals in the next decade, a cost-efficient solution to decarbonization is worth billions.

Our solution?

**We are creating a platform that allows for both CDR and low-cost polymer manufacturing while sidestepping traditional roadblocks of scaling up bacterial cultures using generative models and CRISPR.**

We’ve figured out a way to make the most productive cyanobacterial species (cyanobacteria were the organisms behind the Great Oxidation Event ~2bn years ago) grow even faster – to the best of our knowledge, going through the literature on the topic, we have created the fastest photosynthesizing organism alive. We have also determined chemoenzymatic processes from the cyanobacteria’s enzyme output that can create starch from carbon dioxide. We are starting with starch as the quintessential polymer but hope to have a process that is generalizable enough to reapply to other more valuable polymers down the line.



Fig 1: Some of our bacteria! These are all engineered strains to various degrees – with one of the more promising ones on the left (the deeper the green, the better the growth).

**We have a self-sufficient team.**

[Ankit Singhal]( was a Science Research Fellow and Named Scholar of Columbia University. He has worked in both wet labs and computational labs (focusing on catalysis and structural biology) for years. He published several first-author papers even in high school and won and led national teams at international science/research competitions. He’s ready to lead Anthrogen’s _damp_ lab approach as CEO.

[Connor Lee]( was the youngest-ever Columbia Robotics president and a researcher at the ROAM lab at Columbia. He has over 10 years of experience building robots and tinkering—he placed 3rd internationally for FRC and top 5 internationally for MATE ROV. As Anthrogen's CTO, he is instrumental in designing the systems hardware approach for autonomous cell harvesting, filtration, high-throughput enzyme cascading, etc.

[Vignesh Karthik]( performed ML/geology research at the Naval Research Laboratory and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia’s Earth Institute. His work in sediment analysis translates well into bacterial culture movement prediction (important for optimizing growth rate and conditions). He is also working on parallelizing and automating the system design along with all the geological work related to carbon storage as Anthrogen’s COO.



_Fig 2: Office hours with PG!_

We’d love to talk to:

*   Synthetic biologists.
*   Anyone interested in offsetting their carbon emissions.
*   Those looking for a platform for analytical-grade recombinant protein expression.
*   You! Even if it’s just to say hi, we love to yap.

Feel free to email us or send us an intro if you can at [founders@anthrogen.com](mailto:founders@anthrogen.com).

### Other Company Launches

### Arctic Capture 🧪 Genetically engineering bacteria for carbon capture

We use CRISPR, bacteria, and robots to fight climate change at scale!

[Read Launch ›](

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