Amyris Stock – Producing Ingredients Using Synbio

Fake it until you make it applies to the startup world as well. Oftentimes, a company will set out doing “business plan A” and end up finalizing on “business plan E.” That’s fine when you’re growing a new business, but not so good when you’re a publicly traded stock (cough, Organovo, cough). Sometimes you’ll have an entire class of stocks fail at the same time, something we noted in our 2017 piece on WTF Happened to Synthetic Biology Stocks? One of those stocks is a company called Amyris (AMRS).

A quick look at the Amyris investor deck shows that this stock has undergone a serious transformation. In the past year, shares of this $4.8 billion company have soared +309% compared to a Nasdaq return of +45% over the same time frame. Now that the company seems to have found their way, we want to take another look at what they’ve been up to.

The Potential of Synthetic Biology

Before we get into the details, it’s important to rehash the value proposition for synthetic biology (synbio) in the context of companies like