Our Innovation Analysts recently looked into up-and-coming startups working on solutions based on biomimicry. As there is a large number of startups working on a wide variety of solutions, we decided to share our insights with you. This time, we are taking a look at 5 promising biomimetics startups.
Heat Map: 5 Top Biomimetics Startups
Using our StartUs Insights Platform, covering 1.116.000+ startups & emerging companies, we looked at innovation in the field of nature-inspired technologies. For this research, we identified 75 relevant solutions and picked 5 to showcase below. These companies were chosen based on a data-driven startup scouting approach, taking into account factors such as location, founding year, and relevance of technology, among others. Depending on your specific criteria, the top picks might look entirely different.
The Global Startup Heat Map below highlights 5 startups & emerging companies developing innovative biomimetics solutions. Moreover, the Heat Map reveals regions that observe a high startup activity and illustrates the geographic distribution of all 75 companies we analyzed for this specific topic.
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Bimitech – Biomimetic Cooling Technology
Biomimetic designs take inspiration from nature to improve technology products and mechanisms in use today. From plants, birds, land animals, and ocean life, various technologies and use cases look to mimic biological processes through engineering. Further, this type of nature-mimicking design works to enhance technology products to its maximum efficiency.
The US-based startup Bimitech builds cooling fans that utilize a hummingbird-inspired design. The startup’s biomimetic cooling technology keeps electronic chips cooler using a bio-inspired wing attached to a membrane. The leading edge of the membrane is linked to Eagle, an advanced bending actuator, to oscillate around its neutral position. Inertial and aerodynamic forces later rotate the wing and create axial airflow. This biomimetic design allows the fans to remain quiet, improve flow profile, and also increase efficiency.
Biome Renewables – Biomimetic Wind Turbine Retrofit
Another advantage of biomimetic engineering lies in the understanding of biological characteristics to scale its design. With measurements for efficient biomimetic models, companies are able to scale their product offerings, both in size and volume. Moreover, biomimicry has the potential to affect both entire products as well as different components of a product.
Biome Renewables is a Canadian startup that takes inspiration from the kingfisher and the maple seed to manufacture turbine retrofitting for wind energy. The startup offers PowerCone, a turbine retrofit that channels incoming wind onto the blades to address root leakage. PowerCone mimics the kingfisher in its ability to skim the water to enable smooth airflow onto the blades’ surface. This solution mimics a maple seed by utilizing its energy-saving techniques, allowing for efficient channeling of wind onto the blades. As a result, these biomimetic innovations produce turbines with reduced loads and increased power.
BEOnChip – Biomimetic Environment On-Chip
The confluence of biomimetics and nanotechnology provides opportunities for startups to create novel materials, devices, and processes, and products. Current research and development (R&D) into macromolecular biomimicry focuses on atomic-level changes to influence the behavior of different technologies. Manipulating materials at the molecular level also enables emerging solutions that integrate biomimetics with microfluidics and microelectronics to create new products.
Spanish startup BeOnChip combines cyclo olefin polymers (COP) and cyclic olefin copolymers (COC) with microfabrication techniques to create novel in-vitro testing platforms. The startup employs a variety of microlithography, micromachining, and thermoplastic injection techniques to reduce the cost and time spent on the development of new drugs, cosmetics, and chemicals. The BeOnChip platforms are suitable for testing custom organ-on-chips (OOC), cell cultures, and lab instrumentation, as well as original equipment manufacturing (OEM) and original design manufacturing (ODM) for life science applications.
denovoMATRIX – Biomimetic Coatings
At the molecular level, biomimetic applications prove to be very useful for the life sciences industry. Pharma and biotechnology companies are constantly testing and identifying the behavior of cells to provide highly effective products. In tandem with the growing applications in the cell, gene, and stem cell therapies, microfluidic solutions provide emerging companies with easier ways to test their cell culture. Owing to the large number of environmental factors that affect a cell, life sciences startups are developing novel solutions that aim to speed up the testing process.
German startup denovoMATRIX provides screenMATRIX, a tool to rapidly test a large number of cell microenvironments simultaneously. denovoMATRIX technology incorporates important biological ligands for cell adhesion, spreading, and robust growth, within its biomimetic coatings. The startup offers 96 coating compositions that represent 96 different microenvironments in the screenMATRIX which is ready to use without further preparation. Researchers simply seed their cells on the screenMATRIX and discover which coatings are most suitable for their work.
Bioxegy – Biomimicry Applications
Biomimetics has the potential to disrupt almost all manufacturing and related applications. Offering highly efficient systems that utilize low energy, biomimetics also enables scaling products quickly. While all bio-inspired solutions show better performance, for example in construction materials or aerospace design, they still rely only on one or two concepts. Startups today combine the collective research into biomimetics and offer various industries with the novel, customized solutions.
Bioxegy is a French startup specializing in biomimetics-based innovation for various industries including aerospace, automotive, and healthcare. The startup draws inspiration from all of nature and develops solutions based on plants, birds, land, and marine life. These diverse biomimetic solutions enable the creation of new products, processes, coatings, or materials. These innovations incorporate higher resistance, flexibility, and lightness, as well as aerodynamics, grip, and thermoregulation, among others.
What About The Other 70 Solutions?
While we believe data is key to creating insights it can be easy to be overwhelmed by it. Our ambition is to create a comprehensive overview and provide actionable innovation intelligence that enables you to achieve your goals faster. The 5 biomimetics solutions showcased above are promising examples out of 75 we analyzed for this article. To identify the most relevant solutions based on your specific criteria, get in touch.
