aid: microbyre
name: MicroByre
description: >-
  MicroByre was a Berkeley, California synthetic biology company founded in 2017 by CEO
  and co-founder Sarah Richardson to "domesticate" wild-type bacteria — building an
  automated characterization and genetic-tool pipeline that made naturally occurring,
  never-before-engineered microbes tractable so they could ferment unrefined waste
  biomass into commodity chemicals, enzymes, food ingredients and probiotics at costs
  petrochemical routes could not match. It raised roughly $20.5M, including backing from
  Prime Coalition's Prime Impact Fund, and went out of business; Prime Coalition lists it
  as "no longer active" and C&EN reported the shutdown. MicroByre was a wet-lab platform
  company, not a software vendor: it published no developer program, no API, and no
  machine-readable contract, and its own domain no longer resolves to a web server.
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/microbyre/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: harvest:secondary-market
x-tier: stub
x-tier-reason: harvest
deliveryModel:
  model: unknown
  open_source: false
  commercial: false
  callable_host: false
  label: Delivery model not determined — needs a product licence on record
  confidence: low
  source:
  - none
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
specificationVersion: '0.20'
created: '2026-08-25'
modified: '2026-08-25'
tags:
- Company
- Biotechnology
- Synthetic Biology
- Industrial Biotechnology
- Bioengineering
- Climate Tech
- Chemicals
apis: []
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
common:
- type: LinkedIn
  url: https://www.linkedin.com/company/microbyre
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-08-25'
  status: minimal
  artifacts_added: 2
  pass: local-v1
x-coverage:
  state: none
  reason: defunct
  detail: >-
    MicroByre is out of business — microbyre.com publishes no A record and
    www.microbyre.com is a dangling CNAME to a deleted CloudFront distribution, so
    nothing of the company's own web surface can be fetched at all.
  evidence:
  - url: https://microbyre.com/
    status: 0
  - url: https://www.microbyre.com/
    status: 0
  - url: https://www.primecoalition.org/investee-library/microbyre
    status: 200
  checked: '2026-08-25'