The Bay Area knows denim.
In 1853, Levi Strauss opened a dry goods shop in San Francisco to earn a living catering to the needs of gold miners who heard the calls of “eureka!” Two decades later, Strauss and a tailor named Jacob Davis patented modern blue jeans with metal rivets.
The blue cotton pants have endured as a practical working garment and a fashion staple, but the dying process involves chemicals, raw materials and lots of water. Now a Berkeley startup, Huue, is making one part of the manufacturing process more sustainable: replacing indigo with a bio-identical synthetic version that requires fewer resources to produce and use.
Huue was co-founded in 2019 by CEO Michelle Zhu, 29, and Chief Scientific Officer Tammy Hsu, 31. On Wednesday, the company announced a $14.6 million in a Series A led by Material Impact and including HSBC Asset Management’s Climate Tech VC, SOSV’s IndieBio, iGlobe, and Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna and her husband Jamie Cate.
It brings the startup's total funding to more than $17 million.
“Our mission is to culture nature’s rainbow to create cleaner sources of color for any industries that are shaping the future of the planet,” Zhu told me.
The idea for the company stems from Hsu’s time researching synthetic biology at UC Berkeley where she was looking into how to recreate indigo in a lab, a notoriously difficult feat. Huue’s strategy is to use fermentation to produce a synthetic indigo dye that mimics the vibrant color as it’s found in nature.
Even during that research phase, the work was garnering a lot of interest from the fashion industry, Zhu said.
Zhu had been working in business operations and consulting, but she also has a personal connection to the textile industry.
When she was 3 years old, her parents moved the family to the U.S. from China and started their own apparel brands in Los Angeles. And she remembers taking family trips to China during summer vacation where her parents would take her along with them to visit textile factories.
Eventually, Zhu and Hsu decided to combine their skills and experiences to launch Huue.
They’ve since developed a process to ferment microbes in large vats and then extract an indigo-like substance that can be used as a one-to-one replacement in large-scale textile manufacturing.
The process involves sequencing the enzymes that naturally occur in the indigo plant, programming microbes, feeding the microbes sugars, waiting for the microbes to excrete the desired color, and then isolating and extracting the color.
“We’re actually creating a bio-identical solution to what is already being used in the supply chain,” Zhu said. "We can’t substitute any old blue dye into the supply chain. It has to be indigo.”
The company says it is already working with well-known denim brands that want to integrate Huue’s product into their supply chains, and it expects to release a co-branded pair of jeans in the near future. Zhu declined to reveal which brand partners they’re working with at the moment, but curious minds can speculate.
Zhu sees opportunities beyond textiles, as well, and said Huue could develop all sorts of synthetic dyes for use in the food and cosmetics industries.
The company has 15 employees, a figure that could potentially double this year, and while they will be hiring more scientists, Huue will start adding more commercial roles this year, Zhu said. And the new funding will also help the team scale up production.
“The focus for us is on being able to create a success story with indigo and expanding into creating a color revolution,” Zhu said. “I’m really excited to be able to bring this kind of synthetic biology, new approaches, this new innovation into a space that really wants it and needs it.”
