REFERENCE
[The Struggles of Biotech Ventures]
(The venture with the longest road to success, but...)
Of all venture businesses, the algae bio venture business is by far the most difficult to succeed in.
This is especially true for those who, like me, see the breakthrough to success in the algae cultivation business as equipment development.
You can't even get started unless you have a concept for a new bioreactor born from a brilliant idea.
In my case, I started with an outdoor biodome system, then an indoor bioreactor using LEDs, commonly known as "MOMO."
In order to give these two bioreactors their remarkable performance, it was necessary to have engineers who could be called development geniuses.
Even with such advantages, there are development costs, production of test equipment, setting up a mini plant, setting up a production plant, and all of these incur initial costs and running costs.
The investment can only be recovered once the actual production system is in place, the product biomass is obtained, and useful substances are extracted from it to create a product.
It's a dizzyingly long journey.
And the things we deal with are living creatures that react sensitively to their surroundings.
As mentioned above, the cultivation of these microscopic plants can be hindered by various factors, and in the worst case, they will be completely wiped out.
The amount of capital required to cover all these steps is enormous, but it is difficult to raise the funds.
Normally, venture capital plays that role, but in Japan, bio venture businesses are avoided because the success pattern is not as predictable or clear as in IT.
This background may be a strong influence in the fact that, up until now, there have been many cases where people have not worked on developing equipment, but have instead taken what I consider to be the easy step of culturing using existing cultivation systems and then producing products.
In fact, it was an unspeakable struggle to raise funds to repeatedly go through the steps of developing equipment and then scaling up, and to build up the know-how on equipment and operations for large-scale production.
However, it was clear that compromising on the difficulties here would result in only short-term profits being sought, and in the end, the algae cultivation business would return to the stagnation pattern it has been in the past.
What I wanted to do was to create an algae cultivation business that could bring out the full potential of microalgae using equipment that had achieved an innovative breakthrough.
And now, with the new type of cultivation equipment we had envisioned, we are finally ready to scale up.
As mentioned above, we were fortunate to have the cooperation of a brilliant engineer.
Scaling up from a tabletop model cultivation equipment to large-scale cultivation requires endless trial and error.
However, our cultivation system and operational know-how were accumulated from the beginning with large-scale cultivation in mind, and have been cultivated through actual operation, so they can be put into practice immediately.
The IT industry is, of course, important.
However, at the same time, in the coming age, don't we need production businesses that can guarantee the global environment and people's health, especially the health and happy lives of our children's generation?