Bolt Threads

Mycel’s mushroom-based biomaterials sprout $10M in funding

Mycel, a South Korean startup making fungal-based biomaterials that can replace leather and meat, said it has raised $10 million (13 billion WON) in a pre-Series A round of funding. Co-founder and CEO

MycoWorks, making leather from fungi, closes $125M to scale production

The company touts its Fine Mycelium process as the only mycelium engineered to be made-to-order and made-to-specification.

Allbirds is investing in a plant-based leather substitute, plans faux-leather shoe drop in December

The sustainability focused shoe maker Allbirds has taken another step to green its supply chain with a small $2 million investment in a new company called Natural Fiber Welding. Announced this morning

John Legend and Natalie Portman want you to try wearing fungus instead of leather

Natalie Portman and John Legend are joining a group of venture capitalists and unnamed fashion brands backing MycoWorks, a company that just raised $45 million to commercialize its technology that mak

Bolt Threads partners with Adidas, owners of Balenciaga and Gucci, and Stella McCartney on mushroom leather

Bolt Threads has brought together some new and existing partners, including Stella McCartney, Kering (the fashion house behind brands like Balenciaga, Gucci, Alexander McQueen and Bottega Veneta), Lul

Synthetic biology startups are giving investors an appetite

There’s a growing wave of commercial activity from companies that are creating products using new biological engineering technologies. Perhaps the most public (and tastiest) example of the promi

Biology as technology will reinvent trillion-dollar industries

We face two major threats today: one to the health of our planet and the other to our own. Fortunately, biology and technology are creating fixes for the planet as well as for the human body.

Foundation Capital, now 24 years old, just closed its ninth fund with $350 million in capital commitments

Not all venture firms are long for this world. Though they tend to shut down exceedingly quietly, it sometimes happens when the returns just aren’t compelling or a firm grows too fast or there&#

Innovation Endeavors debuts Deep Life, an incubator focused on the intersection of life science and computer science

Innovation Endeavors, the fund backed by Google’s Eric Schmidt, has for years now been taking a novel approach to working on difficult and still-evolving problems, like cybersecurity and food sh

Bolt Threads joins Modern Meadow in the quest to bring lab-grown leather to market

There’s a new world of lab-grown replacements coming for everything, from the meat department in your grocery store to a department store near you. Lab-made leather replacements will soon join v

Spider silk startup Bolt Threads closes on $123 million in Series D funding

Bolt Threads, the startup making spider silk from microbugs, has raised a giant $123 million Series D round of funding. As we reported in November, an SEC filing showed the company had raised $106 m

Bolt Threads is raising $106 million from Foundation Capital and Formation 8

Our spidey senses are tingling over here. According to an SEC filing, TechCrunch has learned Bolt Threads, the biotech company spinning microbes into spider silk, is raising a whopping $106 million in

These cities in California’s East Bay are raking in venture capital

San Francisco Bay Area companies raise so much venture capital relative to other places that a lot of little-known cities in the region outrank major metropolises in total funding. In this two-part se

Bolt Threads debuts its first product, a $314 tie made from spiderwebs

It may not look like a bunch of cobwebs, but the tie you see above was spun from the same material spiders spin out from their behinds. The difference is this thread was mass produced from fermented m

Bolt Threads raises $50 million to brew spider silk, inks deal with Patagonia

If the idea of wearing spider silk intrigues, the idea of managing a farm full of spiders isn’t all that appealing. A startup called <a target="_blank" href="https://boltthreads.com">Bolt Threads</a

Bolt Threads Comes Out Of Stealth With $40 Million In Funding To Make Clothing From Material Found In Spider Webs

Do you like spiders? Do you like the idea of wearing spider webs? Well, you’ll soon be able to wear clothing made from the same material as spider webs if a new startup called Bolt Threads gets