Back when Amazon was still just an e-commerce company, founder Jeff Bezos became so frustrated that every project took so long to get going that he asked his then-chief of staff, Andy Jassy, to investigate. What Jassy found is that everyone was spending all their time reinventing wheels:
“…(Jassy) found a running complaint. The executive team expected a project to take three months, but it was taking three months just to build the database, compute or storage component. Everyone was building their own resources for an individual project, with no thought to scale or reuse.
The internal teams at Amazon required a set of common infrastructure services everyone could access without reinventing the wheel every time, and that’s precisely what Amazon set out to build — and that’s when they began to realize they might have something bigger.
That something bigger eventually became AWS, which Jassy visualized as something he called the Internet OS, where the company would provide all the necessary ingredients for an Internet company to run a successful business.
While both Bezos and Jassy were visionaries to realize they could offer Amazon’s industry-leading Internet infrastructure as a platform to help Internet companies could build products, no one – not even Bezos or Jassy – could have predicted the company’s cloud services would eventually become a $46 billion annual business.
Since then, we’ve seen the infrastructure-as-a-service playbook applied to new verticals, from delivery to food service production. But when it comes to building the future of food, we’ve yet to see any companies create a full-stack production platform for alt protein.
Enter Perfect Day. The company, which has made a name for itself with its pioneering precision-fermentation derived animal-identical proteins, has begun to put together the pieces to help create essentially what is an AWS for alt-protein, particularly precision fermentation.
The latest move in the company’s evolution towards becoming a full-stack microbial fermentation services company is its acquisition of Sterling Biotech Limited (SBL), an India-based biomanufacturing services company that currently serves the pharmaceutical and food industries. According to the announcement, the acquisition will double the company’s production capability by adding four high-value assets. These manufacturing facilities include fermenters that provide precision fermentation capabilities, which Perfect Day will use to expand its precision fermentation capabilities while continuing to service existing SBL customers.
This news comes just a couple of months after Perfect Day announced the formalization of their enterprise services business, which the company is calling nth, under which it plans to offer expertise and technology services to partners developing food and other products that utilize precision fermentation-derived inputs. According to Perfect Day, the company worked for two years to develop the nth services business, building out its scale-up production, IP licensing, strain engineering services, and other precision fermentation solutions.
nth is the only enterprise biology company in the world that offers end-to-end expertise and services from the earliest stages of molecular development to commercial-scale manufacturing, and the many steps in between.
While Perfect Day has a lead in creating an alternative protein services platform, they aren’t the only ones trying to become an essential partner for others. For example, Gingko and its Motif subsidiary are working to build an ingredient platform business, and BioBrew is offering scaled manufacturing services to companies like Clara. Others, like Pow, provide scale-up services and infrastructure to companies in the early stages of product development. But none of these have the depth of services that Perfect Day has, at least now.
There’s been much conversation as of late around how companies in alternative protein will scale their products to make them more affordable and plentiful enough to make a dent in traditional animal agriculture. Perfect Day’s answer this to make their processes, technology, and production infrastructure available to others, so these early-stage companies don’t spin their wheels trying to recreate the wheel.
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