Integrated Dynamics Update #12
Expanding our platform and getting to market.
Integrated Dynamics is pioneering high-temperature fermentation (HTF), a biological platform leveraging hyperthermophiles (high-temperature microbes) for sustainable hydrocarbon production.
The Bottom Line:
Last quarter we broke news of our ability to engineer the production and secretion of enzymes near the boiling point of water, making us the only startup with this capability. This quarter, we’ve expanded upon these capabilities and hit some pretty impressive milestones:
Beat the record for ethanol production above 85ºC by 700% by engineering an entirely novel pathway
Engineered the first acetone pathway operational above 85ºC
Engineered the highest temperature growth on cellulose @ 95ºC
On the commercial side, we’ve focused our efforts on slashing CAPEX and CAC by tuning our technology to be retrofit-compatible with ethanol infrastructure. To that end, we’ve:
Started 4 in-house pilots with ethanol partners to turn their corn waste into more value
Began front-end engineering towards our 1,000 L scale-up, planned for 2026
Partnered with specialist EPCs to outline how we can reconfigure existing ethanol infrastructure to deploy HTF faster
Science: breaking through @ 90ºC
For the past century, industrial ethanol fermentation has been conducted in batches, where ethanol production and separation are sequential processes. Over the span of 72 hours, a fermenter is filled, inoculated, drained, sanitized, and refilled, leading to equipment downtime and low time efficiency. Why? Because microbes hate ethanol.
Industry wisdom has suggested that faster-growing yeast would ameliorate this problem, but we’ve taken another position: fermentation would be simpler if you didn’t have to stop it every few days. At Integrated Dynamics, we’re a system around organisms that thrive at temperatures where ethanol naturally escapes the broth, so that it never reaches toxic ethanol levels.
This quarter, we delivered the highest-titer ethanol fermentation above 85°C — achieving vapor-phase ethanol recovery and total ethanol titers over 700% higher than any prior result.
Continuous operation at these conditions required advances across the entire system. We carefully selected enzymes that stay active above 90°C, built genetic frameworks that sustain high expression under thermal stress, and evolved strains to grow in high-substrate, high-product environments. These capabilities enable efficient chemical production at elevated temperatures — the critical step for continuous, low-cost production of bio-based fuels, chemicals, and materials.
Engineering: not reinventing the wheel
Why don’t we just build more bioreactor capacity? It’s actually already out there.
There are hundreds of facilities with a combined fermentation volume eclipsing the rest of the biomanufacturing industry by a factor of more than 100, all waiting idly in the cornfields of the Great Plains for another industrial revolution. The US government has poured billions into developing the world’s highest-performance ethanol supply chain, and we intend to unshackle it from underpowered biotechnology with High-Temperature Fermentation (HTF).
We’ve spent the past quarters coordinating with specialty EPCs and ethanol facilities to develop a low-CAPEX method to drop HTF into existing ethanol facilities. We’ll take advantage of existing supply chains, labor pools, and hardware to lower CAPEX and GTM time, bringing our industrial profitability horizon towards 2028.
If you’d like to learn more, reach out at hmarkarian@int-dyn.com or over LinkedIn.