The following interview is a conversation we had with Kevin Flyangolts, CEO & Founder of Aclid, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $4 Million Raised to Build the Future of Biosecurity
Kevin Flyangolts
Thanks so much, Brett.
Brett
Super excited. And I’d love to just begin with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Kevin Flyangolts
Yeah, sure. So I’m Kevin Flyingolds. Started Aclid about two and a half years ago. We are focused in biosecurity. I come from a software engineering background, have been in the tech industry for some time. This is my first company in biotech, but I was absolutely just enamored with how you can program biology. Synthetic biology took me over pretty quickly and I never turned back. So I’m really excited to be here and really excited to chat more about what we’re doing. I was in the tech industry at a blockchain company before in a consumer based home services startup. I was one of the first engineers at Umbrella, which was a home services startup back in 2018. And I built a lot of the tech there. Ended up growing out the team, and we ended up getting acquired actually in November of 21.
Kevin Flyangolts
Around that time, I joined a much larger company called IAC. They acquired Umbrella and they had a big home services brand of their own. I ran product there for a little bit, helping grow the business model that we built at umbrella this much larger.org. And about six months in, we grew from a team of 15, a small startup, into a team of 40. I felt like a much larger company at the time, and I was really excited to dive back into something super early and even start something on my own. So I left in May and started looking a lot into biotech. I started a company with Professor Harris Wong. He’s a professor of systems biology at Columbia University. And we really focused on DNA and rna manufacturing because we realized that was the core building blocks of synthetic biology.
Kevin Flyangolts
It was crazy to me to believe that you can order DNA from anthrax, from controlled agents really just online. And a lot of the process to do that was really manual. And so we’ve started to build some software that helps automate it end to end, helping the manufacturer to avoid calling up a customer, avoid having to screen their order and look at what’s inside. And instead of relying on more software and automation to tell them when there are real risks and help the customer, automatically certifying that they have the right permissions, the right facilities and the right documents to actually ship the order and do it without any type of liability or risk of non compliance. So that’s a little bit about us and a little bit about me.
Brett
How did you and Harris get connected?
Kevin Flyangolts
We actually got connected through another collaborator. So Harris is pretty established researcher, I think, worked together for about three months before starting the company, and he has some researchers in the University of Minnesota, twins and a few researchers in the UK. And we got connected a couple of different ways through them. I was working with a few other researchers on cell free synthesis and design tools for synthetic biology. And so from that they thought that Harris would be a really great intro for me. We got connected immediately hit it off and realized we have a lot of the same ambitions, super complementary skill sets. He obviously has a lot deeper of bio background than I do, and I come from an operational background.
Kevin Flyangolts
He didn’t want to leave his position as a professor, so just naturally worked really well together with him bringing a lot of the scientific domain knowledge, a lot of his network in the space, and me taking on a lot of the company operations day to day.
Brett
Lets imagine youre at Thanksgiving dinner and your grandma is like, Kevin, what is synthetic biology? How would you explain that?
Kevin Flyangolts
Yeah, for sure. I think its a really new field and I was super excited about it because it felt a lot like programming and computer science, but in the physical world. So I think we all know that living things are made up of DNA. That’s how we make our brain, that’s how you make the arm, how all your organs are made. All of it is encoded in this language of life called DNA. And over the last ten years or so, we figured out not only how to read DNA, so back in the early nineties, we figured out how to sequence the whole human genome, and we did that in record time. And since then, it’s become extremely cheap, with companies like 23 and me offering $100 sequencing of your genome. We’re doing that but with writing.
Kevin Flyangolts
So not just reading the DNA, but you’re now also able to write. So you can take DNA sequences, create new ones, and put them into organisms and have them do something totally new and different. One of the first applications of this was actually insulin, back in the 1980s. I don’t know if you know the history, but before then, we used to have to source insulin from pancreas, which is found in animals, typically was from pigs and horses. And in the eighties, a company called Genentech figured out how to make insulin and bacteria. They took the DNA that made insulin in your pancreas and put it into bacteria, had the bacteria make it. And now we have a much more sustainable path, a much cheaper path to creating insulin.
Kevin Flyangolts
And that has made it much cheaper, much more affordable for everyone to get treatment for diabetes and other diseases. And now we’re doing all that not just with pharmacy and medicine, but also with materials, with chemicals, with foods. Anything that biology makes by either growing through animal or through a plant, we can potentially do in a cell, in a very isolated environment, and produce it at mass. So people are trying to make dairy inside cells, rather than having to wait for a cow and milking it. People are trying to make materials, fabrics like leather, all in cell based workflows, where you don’t need the whole animal. So really exciting things that you can do by modifying life, not just reading it helped us understand it, now that we’re able to write it.
Kevin Flyangolts
Synthetic biology is all about taking living organisms that don’t exist in nature, necessarily, and introducing them to build something totally new and something that can make something more sustainable or much more affordable.
Brett
Let’s talk a little bit about the early days, the founding of the company. So, take us back to 2021, and what were you and Harris doing for the first, like, three months, the first six months, what did that look like?
Kevin Flyangolts
Yeah, for sure. A lot of it was just talking to people, anyone that we could talk to, trying to understand what problems they were having. This was at the height of the pandemic. Obviously, security was top of mind. There was a whole ton of attention being put on this space of synthetic biology and what it means to do it safely. And how do we continue to advance this field while minimizing the risks, but maximizing the innovation? We definitely didn’t want to be in a place where we restricted all the research and stopped the field where it was, but we also needed to make sure that it was growing in a sustainable way, where were handling all the risks along the way.
Kevin Flyangolts
Similar to kind of what’s happening with AI now, with government taking a precautionary measure and starting to look at it much more carefully ahead of problems actually being there. So at that time knew that there were already some manufacturers that were abiding by guidelines, mostly voluntarily, because they saw this as a big problem, they saw it as a liability and they thought not just for their own businesses, but for the overall business. If anything were to go wrong, this could be a huge economic risk for the US and for the entire industry here. We really didn’t want to lose trust in consumers in this space. And so we started to really try to understand what it is that manufacturers were tackling. What were the biggest problems?
Kevin Flyangolts
We spent probably the first three months talking to 40 to 60 different manufacturers and just learning, figuring out what it is that they do day to day. Where are the biggest pain points? Is it in the screening? Is it in the vetting of the customer? Is it somewhere totally else? Is it the follow up? And within that first three months, we learned a bunch, built the first prototype, and started to sell it to early stage manufacturers. We realized that they had the biggest need. Their systems were oftentimes all manual, no automation. They didn’t have the resources to dedicate building a full system like a large manufacturer would. And so it was just a clear value prop for us to offer them an end to end solution for biosecurity.
Kevin Flyangolts
Over time, we learned a lot, and now were starting to work with some of the largest manufacturers in the space, replacing their in house systems, making them more automated, and giving them their ability to focus back on the chemistry and the manufacturing, rather than on the administrative burden of compliance.
Brett
What did you do to get those first paying customers to give you a shot? I think that’s something that every startup struggles with, and especially in the world that you’re in, I’m sure trust is everything. How’d you break through and how’d you get that first chance?
Kevin Flyangolts
I can’t say that Harris didn’t help. He has a big name in the industry, he’s a very established researcher. So definitely a lot of intros, warm connections from him helped build some of that trust. And I think the other thing here is when you’re an early stage company, you are dealing with a lot of problems. There’s a lot of things that you, as an early stage manufacturer, have to work on. It’s already super difficult to start a company. If you’re starting a company that requires facilities, 50 people, just to get started, just to build your first product and sell it to a customer, there’s just that much more. And dealing with compliance burdens along that way makes it that much harder. And so anyone that can make a dent there and do it in a reasonable timeframe with affordable price was an easy sell.
Kevin Flyangolts
So to some extent it was that we found a need where there was somebody willing to trust us because the pain point was deep enough for them to take a bet on a startup and see if they can solve their problem. And that’s where we got started. And obviously we’ve built a lot of the product along the way. Hearing feedback from our early customers, iterating to get to a point where it’s actually mature enough and starts to solve not just the problems of the earliest manufacturers, but also the problems of large companies that have established processes and have automated systems.
Brett
Whats your day to day look like right now?
Kevin Flyangolts
It used to be a lot more engineering and I started the company technical and ive been moving more and more away from the technical and starting to focus more on our go to market, figuring out how do we build a repeatable sales motion so that we can start to scale the business and work with every single manufacturer in the space. A lot of my day today is talking to customers, working with our engineers on the product and building up our sales infrastructure, building up content, getting people to know us. The visibility of our brand is really important as the regulatory starts to pick up. We want to be in a place where if you think biosecurity, if you think about compliance for gene synthesis, we’re the first company you turn to. And that takes a lot of content.
Kevin Flyangolts
It takes a lot of time to build the right relationship. So a lot of my time has been spent on talking to customers and building out content, just getting our names out there, making sure people know who we are.
Brett
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Brett
Now back today’s episode. From a marketing perspective, how would you define your marketing philosophy?
Kevin Flyangolts
I think with the way that we see it right now is we want to offer super technical, useful resources. I personally really like what the cybersecurity space has done in marketing, where they offer you technical resources on SoC two compliance, ISO compliance, on x vulnerability or y exploit, and those technical resource end up helping you build trust with that company. You end up going to them time and time again just to figure things out internally, that at some point it starts to make sense for you to just go directly to them for the service that they’re providing. And so we’re taking very much the same approach, building resources that are helpful for the community, helpful for manufacturers that are just getting started, or even large enterprises that are being introduced to the regulatory anew.
Kevin Flyangolts
If we can help build a resource for them through content and they come back to us for additional services or additional automation, I think that’s a really great way for us to build our funnel. And so we’ve been focused on building that thought leadership and becoming more and more of a resource for the broader community.
Brett
When people hear the term biosecurity and compliance now, or hear the category biosecurity and compliance, who is the top of mind company? Is there an established leader in this space, or is it so new and emerging that there is no clear leader yet?
Kevin Flyangolts
Were hoping were going to be the established leader, but yeah, its still emerging. Theres no clear leader yet. Theres a few defense contractors that have been in the space for some time. Theres some nonprofits and philanthropic orgs that have been building tools here. Really, its super new. So regulatory is still fresh. The first guidelines in the space did come out about a decade ago, and they just got refreshed last year in October. But the first path towards regulation didnt really get introduced until last year. So last year, we had two bills in Congress, one in the Senate, one in the House, that were both going through their committees to start drafting the first requirements for the industry. They’re being worked on now. And we also had an executive order that actually stemmed from AI.
Kevin Flyangolts
I’m sure lots of people are familiar with the executive order on safe and trustworthy development of AI. That came out in the US that was really focused on llms. But there was about two pages dedicated to biology and specifically focused on how llms enable users and practitioners to build things through biology that they weren’t able to before. And that raised a lot of attention in Capitol Hill, because now biology becomes a bigger vulnerability. It’s something that we need to really think about who has access to certain infrastructure and who’s able to get access to these materials that have some dual use potential.
Kevin Flyangolts
And so from that executive order, we now are starting to get a compliance framework and some of the first mandatory requirements coming down from federal agencies on how vendors, providers of DNA and RNA, plasmids viral vectors, and all of those are servicing the industry, what they have to comply with. We’re starting to get some of those first standards, kind of like what ISO and Soc two have done for cybersecurity and software businesses. We’re starting to see that happen for DNA, rna, plasmid, viral vector manufacturing in the midterm.
Brett
Is that, is policy or regulation something that you’re going to try to be part of in driving that? Like do you have a policy? Are you working with lobbyists? Are you trying to shape any of that, or is that something that maybe is going to come later, or is that something that you’re not going to focus on?
Kevin Flyangolts
We’re definitely very involved on the policy side. We’re working with both policymakers and industry, academia as well as politicians directly to make sure that our voice is heard and the right technical implementation is made. The most important thing here is effective policy. We definitely don’t want to be in a position where policy hurts industry in any way, and we don’t want to be in a position where policy is just not effective and doesn’t actually regulate the industry in a meaningful way. So it’s a balance, and we’ve been working hand in hand with the writers of the framework, with the people building the standards both industry and in government. It’s been a lot of me doing it myself. I’ve been the thought leader so far. I’m sure as we grow, we’ll get someone that’s a little bit more experienced on government affairs and regulatory.
Kevin Flyangolts
But given how new this space is and given that we’re about to see some of the first regulation come out this year, I’ve just been focused on it personally.
Brett
Do you expect the business, it’s just going to blow up in a positive way then, as soon as that comes out?
Kevin Flyangolts
I hope so. Fingers crossed. I think nothing moves quite that fast, but we definitely think it’s going to be a big boon for us. It mandates these requirements across a lot of the industry and might be a forcing function across all the world. In some ways, us is definitely one of the biggest biotech markets, and if theyre requiring it here, it might force companies even operating in the EU, companies operating in Asia that might have customers in the US to also abide by some of the same guidelines. So we definitely see this picking up and moving things in the right direction for us. Well have to see how strict they are, what actually gets written on paper and what gets implemented. But theres a lot of shots on goal here.
Kevin Flyangolts
Theres the compliance framework forum executive order on AI there’s two bills still circulating in Congress. There’s states that have issued guidance or issued regulation. And internationally, there are governments in Europe, the UK, and Asia that are looking at this very actively. So we’ll see a lot of different ways that this gets implemented. We’re hoping it’s harmonized. But one way or the other, we see in a few years the regulatory landscape changing pretty heavily.
Brett
Trey, is there anyone that’s either strongly against regulation or like, opposes your view on the market? Do you have anyone like that?
Kevin Flyangolts
I think everybody mostly agrees that we should have some restrictions here. We don’t let just anyone buy dynamite or buy a ton of fertilizer because we know explosions can be used for good and for bad. We know that there are dual use technologies out there, and we need to make sure we leave them in the right hands. So this industry is no different, just like harsh chemicals, just like explosives or other dual use tech, we want to have some restrictions here. We want to have something that makes sure we’re giving the right researchers access to these materials. We definitely don’t want to impede on legitimate research. There’s legitimate reasons to order DNA from a virus or from a dangerous pathogen. You could be making a vaccine, you could be making a diagnostic therapeutic.
Kevin Flyangolts
You might be just studying virulence and helping the community better understand pathogenicity. So we don’t want to restrict those, but we definitely want the right precautions to be taken. We want there to be the right safety guards, and that just doesn’t exist today. So I would say everybody in the industry that we’ve talked to so far, broadly, agrees that something needs to be done. Where we see disagreement is what exactly needs to be done. How far do you go? And that’s not something that anybody has a strong consensus on yet. The community, the scientific community, and the government community are figuring out together, what does that look like? What is the right balance of minimizing the risks while maximizing innovation?
Brett
From a fundraising perspective, what have you learned so far?
Kevin Flyangolts
Fundraising is hard, and especially in this environment. But weve been really fortunate to have some strong partners, some really early believers in us. 2048 was one of our earliest investors and strongest believers. They invested before I really had a solid idea just investing based on our relationship. And from there we work together on building out that first thesis, figuring out how do we validate this need in the market, and how do we build our first product, how do we hire. They helped us all the way through, and then they also let our seed. So I think one of the things that i’ve learned is just how important relationships are in this space, especially early on. They can dictate a lot of your forward progress. And i’ve personally just been extremely fortunate to be working with some really amazing people.
Kevin Flyangolts
Harris has been an extraordinary help. Some of our advisors have really helped us move forward a lot and investors are much the same. Choosing the right one can be all the difference and we definitely feel fortunate with the ones that we have. 2048 IA Ventures and co-found partners.
Brett
Final question for you, lets zoom out three to five years into the future. Whats the big picture vision?
Kevin Flyangolts
Here we see security as an important layer of synthetic biology once it’s a mature industry. When the Internet came out, there wasn’t really a whole ton of security guardrails. We only really started seeing cybersecurity be taken seriously about five to ten years after the Internet went live and everybody was using it. And I think that’s partly because we wait. We’re reactionary to problems. I think this is a space where we don’t want to be reactionary and where being proactive can be extremely beneficial, just given the drastic types of harm that can be done. And so what I really want to see in the next five to ten years is us be the security and safety layer for this industry. Helping build the infrastructure that helps scientists get access to the tools and the products that they need with as little as possible hurdles.
Kevin Flyangolts
And it being mostly automated, rather than the calls, the emails, the back and forth documents that are being sent around, having that be kind of automatic, like what you have in finance, theres a whole bunch of things that happen every time a transaction goes through, every time you swipe a credit card, every time you send a wire a whole bunch of checks to make sure that theres no fraud. We want to help build that for synthetic biology.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision and i’ve really loved this conversation and I know the audience is going to feel the same. We’re going to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in, that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Kevin Flyangolts
They can visit us at aclid.bio. We have a newsletter that they can sign up for. And please follow me on LinkedIn. Follow along for our journey. And if you’re in this space, if you want to chat, please feel free to reach out directly to me.
Brett
Amazing. Kevin, thanks so much for taking the time.
Kevin Flyangolts
Awesome. Thanks so much for hosting me. This is great.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
Kevin Flyangolts
Yeah, bye.
Brett
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