As part of our Sacramento Inno coverage of the startup, technology and innovation economy, the Business Journal has compiled a list of startups to watch in the new year. These startups are poised to make big moves, either in growth, funding, technology or development. We're highlighting 15 startups, generally with fewer than 100 employees, about 5 years old or less and that have raised less than $50 million.
BCD Bioscience Inc. is a biotechnology spinout from the University of California Davis that is developing ingredients for food and pharma, and also a platform to identify them and their uses.
The company's research focuses on carbohydrates, the most abundant biomolecules on earth, and it is seeking applications to derive bioactive compounds from them.
BCD started up in 2019 in Davis. Last August, it took 9,000 square feet of space in a 90,000-square-foot building at 2535 Capitol Oaks Drive in Sacramento. The biotechnology company was founded by professors at UC Davis to use mass spectrometry approaches to develop a platform that allows potential partner companies or customers to get in-depth chemical compositions of carbohydrates, which can be sourced from vegetables, yeast, fruit, fungi, algae, plants and animal sources.
Mass spectrometry is an analytical tool that can be used to calculate molecular weight, to identify and quantify compounds and to determine their structure and chemical properties. BCD has developed proprietary techniques to transform food-grade substances into products at the cellular level which may have nutritional and immune benefits. It's also building a library of natural sources from which to derive those products and how to do so.
