But only $1B has been invested in recent startups here. Is this about to radically change?
Petrochemical Industry
Gasoline, diesel, plastics. Products that are enabling modern civilization while destroying our environment. These aren’t just inputs to Doordash and private jets. Literally every other industry in the U.S. depends on these three materials and their derivatives. From moving goods and people, to industrial processes and consumer goods, our lives depend on oil. At least until now.
A wave of new technologies is maturing that has the potential to make critical goods without cooking the planet or slowly poisoning us. Synthetic biology and computational chemistry are revealing new enzymes and catalysts that enable us dramatically alter or replace traditional processes in this industry. And new startups are already starting to make gasoline from the carbon in the air, plastics from previously unrecyclable products, and downstream products using plant feedstocks and engineered enzymes.
Dropping Input Costs
Costs for enzyme engineering have dropped 100x in the last 15 years.
Costs to train and run AI models have dropped at least 1000x in the last 5 years.
Petrochemicals is a massive opportunity. Spread the word.
U.S. petrochemicals market is $765B, and synbio approaches to making chemicals have gotten 100x cheaper in the last 15 years.
Large Market
The U.S. petrochemicals market is 5x larger than the US SaaS market.
Few Startup Competitors
Petrochemicals startups have raised far less money than SaaS startups over the last 10 years. Per year, petrochemicals and petrochemical derivatives startups have raised $90 million and SaaS startups have raised $4.7 billion. This makes SaaS a roughly 250x more crowded market than petrochemicals.
Top Companies
Two of the diagnostics startups that have raised the most capital in the last 10 years are Grail and BillionToOne, both based in the Bay Area.
Grail develops multi-cancer diagnostics and has raised $2.0B. Their primary product is a multi-cancer early detection test that looks for a signal shared by 50+ types of cancer with a single blood test.
BillionToOne develops diagnostics for pregnant moms and cancer patients and has raised $295M. Their primary product is a non-invasive screening test for pregnant moms that tests fetuses for 9 different important conditions.
Top Investors
We took the startups in the petrochemicals space who have raised more than $5M over the last 10 years, and searched for their investors. Here’s who we found: