One major deterrent to innovation in biotechnology has been the high costs surrounding launching a new start up. However, thanks to a variety of factors, the cost and effort it takes to start a biotech venture have fallen rapidly in the last few years.

One of the additional contributing factors is that biotech startups are also getting leaner. In fact, lean enough to get noticed by venture firms like Y Combinator and SOS Ventures.

While the former will be seed funding 10 biotech startups in its winter batch, the latter has come up with Indie.Bio (@indbio) — short for independent biology. The program funds teams along with providing them lab space in San Francisco and Ireland to aid in the development of proof-of-concept models.

Ryan Bethencourt serves as the program director for Indie.Bio. He is a strong advocate of fostering innovation in biotechnology and has co-founded Berkeley Biolabs and Counter Culture labs among other ventures. SynBioBeta interviewed him to know more about it.

What led to the inception of IndieBio?

Three major things. Firstly, the cost of building a biotech startup has plummeted based on new technologies like DNA synthesis and qPCR. Also, the mindset required to build startups has migrated from software to hardware and is beginning to be embraced by scientists and hackers for wetware.

Lastly, there is a major funding gap for very early stage biopreneurs. IndieBio intends to fill that gap by not only funding these teams but also training them to become successful entrepreneurs, therefore giving them the runway, business and design support, and confidence they need to change the world. .

We’re now finally at the stage where lean and cost effective biotech can deliver! Biotech has a very long tail for technological innovation!

How do you justify the 8% equity you demand for the $50,000?

IndieBio invests a significant amount of time, energy, and social capital in each company as well as lab space for a year in downtown SF. Our network and focus is solely on biology companies. If you add up all the services and commitments we provide, 8% equity for $50, 000 is actually quite low.

We back entrepreneurs taking real scientific and technological risks (unlike most accelerators and biotech venture firms). Our primary focus is early stage innovators, educating them, and assisting them in increasing their value proposition from our initial valuation of approximately $600k to between $3M-10M within the 100 day accelerator program.

We focus on de-risking both their scientific and business proposition. If successful, we’re also a seed stage venture group and will back our entrepreneurs and lead a true seed financing. We are a large biotech community of mentors and have established relationships with most of the leading investors in both biotech and tech in Silicon Valley, with an increasingly global presence.

How are you different from Y Combinator?

We’re focused purely on building biotech. We do real wet biology, synbio, and focus on the global impact of our companies. Y Combinator is a fantastic software and internet accelerator with a superb alumni network. 10% of the companies in their next class will be biotech focused, but biotech is not software.

We know from experience that science has different pitfalls to software or even hardware. One notable we’ve seen is Halcyon molecular, in which Peter Thiel and Elon Musk misjudged the skill sets of teams, difficulty, and technology needed to develop next generation genome sequencing and burned over $20M of their own money in the process. Something, which we believe could have been avoided earlier through the de-risking processes we’ve built into Indie Bio – to fail faster, cheaper and earlier.

Any success stories?

Four out of the six startups in the first test batch have raised (or are in the process of closing) their first seed rounds. Muufri, Hyasynth Bio, Kilobaser, and Afineur have raised $2M, $1.3M, $500k, and an undisclosed amount, respectively. Indie Bio leads 3 of the rounds (with other investors joining in) and Horizon ventures leads Muufri’s round.

This is a phenomenal result and we are even more excited by our next batch. We expect a lot more syndicates and financings for our future class based on the interest we’ve received from both classical biotech VC’s and also tech and impact investors who are only just starting to invest in biotech.

Where do you see entrepreneurship in biotechnology 5-10 years from now and what role do you think you’ll play in it?

We’re at a crucial point in biotech. The models of the past, which created companies like Amgen and Genentech, no longer work. In addition, government funding for science is stagnant and post docs are stuck in the postdocalypse with no path forward or up.

Our aim at Indie Bio within the next 5-10 years is to create many new, successful biotechnology companies. My personal aim is to help enable the creation of the first impactful and global trillion dollar biotechnology company, dwarfing Google and Apple of the present day!

We think Indie Bio will be playing a leading role in enabling and funding biotechnology entrepreneurship in the next 5-10 years. Our aim at IndieBio is to enable scientists (undergrads, PhD’s, postdocs, professors, and biohackers) globally to build their dreams.