Less than one month after announcing Ginkgo Bioworks as one of the first biotech companies in its network, Y Combinator pulled back the curtains on its investment in Glowing Plant. Both companies are making big, bullish bets on the future of designing biology -- and creating entirely new industries in the process. Is it any coincidence they use the underlying technologies associated with synthetic biology?

Glowing Plant sits at the center of a massive long-term opportunity for engineered plants that extends far beyond novelty products such as its first product, Glowing Plant, shipping later this year. Imagine plants that clean the air of toxic chemicals such as toluene and benzene, plants that act as air fresheners, plants grown specifically for biofuels or aquaculture applications, or plants that provide enough lighting for your home. You'll need to rethink the value of plants.

I recently spoke to Glowing Plant co-founder Antony Evans on the importance of Y Combinator, the startup's rapidly approaching ship date for its first products, the product pipeline, and the big picture view of the opportunity for both plants and consumer products in synthetic biology.

Importance of Y Combinator's interest in synthetic biology

Y Combinator has developed an innovative funding structure for technology startups. It invests $120,000 into a large number of startups twice every year. The monetary value isn't much, but the value isn't in the money, it's in the network. Since 2005, Y Combinator has funded over 700 startups including DropBox, reddit, airbnb, and OMGPOP. Since July, the portfolio has announced the funding of two synthetic biology startups -- with more on the way.

As Evans put it:

The entrepreneurial and educational aspect of Y Combinator is phenomenal. You have access to a tremendous network, can ask questions to an amazing brain trust, and get to listen to successful entrepreneurs discuss how they failed -- and what they did or learned from it.

Some may have been caught by surprise to see Y Combinator plunge into synthetic biology startups. After all, Ginkgo Bioworks and Glowing Plant aren't very similar to cloud storage companies or mobile game developers. But it makes perfect sense if you consider the parallel trajectories of biotech and software startups.

Biotech is no longer married to costly pharmaceutical and agricultural applications -- or their heavy regulatory burdens -- and is free to pursue non-traditional applications with consumer-facing businesses. By leveraging continuously improving infrastructure and technologies, biotech startups such as Glowing Plant are becoming increasingly lean, highly scalable, and getting products to market more quickly.

Image source: Glowing Plant.

In fact, the cost of launching a biotech startup such as Glowing Plant is falling faster than a software startup and has now reached the same cost level where Y Combinator started investing in 2004:

Precipitously falling costs to launch are driven by three things:

1. Availability of on-demand bench space at accelerators and incubators such as QB3, Biocurious, Berkeley BioLabs, Breakout Labs, Synbio Axlr8r, and others.
2. More automation and software increases the productivity of each team member; allowing biotech startups to launch with smaller teams.
3. Decreasing costs of inputs such as cheaper oligonucleotides and genes.

That opens the field to more participants and allows startups to look more like software startups than capital-hungry biotech firms. Building a market-ready product consumes the most time and capital, while scaling and distribution becomes the easy part. There are differences, both good and bad, but customers are actually more willing to pay for physical products. That means Glowing Plant could have software-like business strategies with pharmaceutical-like profit margins (approaching 80% on single products).

What's the first product for Glowing Plant?

Consumers and investors understand that Glowing Plant's first product has more novelty value than functionality. (It's still really cool, as you may have witnessed in person at SynBioBeta San Francisco 2013.) As Y Combinator President Sam Altman recently wrote, "People often accuse people in Silicon Valley of working on things that don’t matter. Often they’re right. But many very important things start out looking as if they don’t matter, and so it’s a very bad mistake to dismiss everything that looks trivial." Whether you see it that way or not, house plants that dimly glow are an important product for the field -- and interest is incredibly high. "We're now taking pre-orders for Glowing Plant seeds, which will ship this fall," Evans told me. "It's pretty clear people want this."

Want to pre-order Glowing Plant seeds and save money because you read this article? I thought so. Navigate to the company's website and use the promo code "SYNBIOBETA" to get 10% off your order.

Now, customers will get a minor bonus. Glowing Plant was granted a low volume exemption from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last week for its Glowing Plant Fuel -- a booster kit that will temporarily increase the luminosity of your glowing house plant. The newly announced booster kit will be fun for the first iteration, but the company's continuous product improvement process (again, similar to software) aims to improve Glowing Plants every year through protein engineering. The brighter the genes, the "brighter" the plants, and the greater the novelty and functional value. Since joining Y Combinator three months ago the team has improved the metabolic pathways by 3.6x:

Data source: Glowing Plant.

What's that translate to in terms of actual luminosity? Here's what the latest protein engineering improvements look like over each of the last nine weeks grown side-by-side on the same agar plate from top left (baseline) to bottom right (nine weeks from baseline):

Image source: Glowing Plant.

To be clear, the improved metabolic pathways won't be in the seeds or plants shipping this fall. They do give an optimistic view of the future of the company, however. If you think that's cool, consider that scientific literature (link opens PDF) indicates that 20,000x to 100,000x improvements are possible. Of course, those improvements are pretty far away, but it hints that plants could be realistic lighting options in your lifetime.

How are Glowing Plants created?

Plants don't glow without a little help! Glowing Plant has streamlined product development into three major phases:

1. Phase 1, Protein Engineering -- conducted with a directed evolution approach using E. coli hosts.
2. Phase 2, Transient Expression -- test pathways and signaling in plants, add enhanced promoter and terminators to each gene.
3. Phase 3: Grow the Plants -- time-consuming but easy to scale.

While Glowing Plant develops protocols for high throughput plant engineering capabilities, it strategically leverages existing infrastructure to speed development costs and times. Evans makes a great point. "Transcriptic has really helped us with DNA construction and assembly. Why should we reinvent the wheel when platforms such as this exist?" The protocols developed now will help the company build an impressive portfolio of products and an unparalleled knowledge of plant synthetic biology, which will lead to a wide range of future products.

What products are in the pipeline?

A dimly glowing houseplant may not give you a very confident opinion of Glowing Plant, but your mistake would be thinking the company's ambitions end there. The first product will bring in early, high-margin revenue for future expansion. The pipeline of products includes Mutant Plants, the company's second official product, and longer-term products such as air purifiers, air fresheners, mosquito-repelling plants, crazily-colored plants, and more. The latter are probably several years or more away, but they're on the radar.

What does the future hold?

Evans views Glowing Plant as establishing the beachhead in a very exciting field -- and he's very bullish on the rate of progress for plant synthetic biology. Why? Glowing Plant introduces functionality with full metabolic pathway engineering, not just single genes. Science on that scale could lead to nitrogen-fixation pathways, improved photosynthesis, improved agricultural feedstocks for renewable chemicals, efficient and economical bioremediation, and more.

"In some ways, I think the opportunity for plant synthetic biology is larger than for microorganisms. Humans have already tackled the scaling issues with plants with the advent of agriculture. The regulatory environment makes it easier to introduce consumer products on a consumer product cycle, not the costly product cycle of traditional biotech."

Other companies will surely arrive in the industry to provide competition, which I think is especially true after they see the success of Glowing Plant. There are already a few types of glowing houseplants available for sale -- some of which hurried products after looking over their shoulders and saw Glowing Plant fast-approaching. The question is, will any of them continue with their ambitions in the same way Evans and the rest of the team envision? It's still extremely early for this new industry. Of course, that's exactly why it's so easy for everyone -- including Y Combinator -- to get excited.

Editor's Note: A previous version of this article stated that Glowing Plant had received an approval from the EPA for Glowing Plant Fuel. In fact, the company was granted a low volume exemption from the agency.