July 16, 2025: BiomEdit, the animal health biotech spun out of Elanco Animal Health in 2022, just locked in an $18.4M Series B round. Led by ag-bio heavyweight Anterra Capital and backed by Nutreco, AgriZeroNZ, Elevate Ventures, and Betagro Ventures, this round isn’t just another check. It’s a strategic push toward launching BE-101 (Optavant™), the first engineered probiotic biologic to prevent necrotic enteritis in broiler chickens. And that’s not niche, it’s a $6B pain point in a sector that produces over 9.5B birds annually in the U.S. alone.
Let that sink in: BiomEdit is dropping living therapeutics into a $6B hole in poultry health, not with antibiotics, but with probiotic vectored antibodies, engineered bugs designed to neutralize pathogens from the inside out. It’s microbiome meets synthetic biology meets economic logic. A full-stack answer to the industry’s antibiotic addiction.
Co-founder and CEO Aaron Schacht isn’t new to the rodeo. After 30 years driving innovation at Eli Lilly and Elanco, he’s now helming a company that was born from Elanco’s microbiome R&D and supercharged by Ginkgo Bioworks’ foundry-level strain engineering. BiomEdit’s tech? Fermentation meets AI. CRISPR meets regulatory precision. It’s not just innovation, it’s industrial-scale reinvention with USDA licenses in its sights.
And they’re not standing alone. Diamond Animal Health is scaling up commercial production. Nutreco’s leaning in again, not just with capital, but with global R&D and distribution muscle. There’s even Gates Foundation grant money supporting methane-reducing probiotics for cattle. This isn’t a one-trick chicken show. It’s an expanding platform: poultry, swine, cattle, even companion animals.
The lesson here? Focus wins. BiomEdit didn’t try to solve everything at once. They took a six-billion-dollar gut health problem and built a biologic from the microbe up. That’s how you earn investor conviction. That’s how you earn USDA approval. That’s how you make sure your engineered bugs don’t just survive, they scale.
Congrats to Aaron Schacht, CTO Kristin Bloink, and the whole BiomEdit crew for pushing real science into real-world impact. The feed additive and livestock health game just got a lot more engineered.
