Date: Aug 15, 2018 Author: Amy Feldman Source: Forbes (
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Dan Widmaier, cofounder and CEO of Bolt Threads, dons a white lab coat with his name and the numeral one--for employee number one--on the back before opening a door to the company's lab. Inside, Widmaier and his cofounders, David Breslauer and Ethan Mirsky, are growing artificial spider silk, something that scientists around the world have been trying to do for decades. Spider silk is known for being extremely soft and strong, and it could make long-lasting, lightweight and desirable clothes.
Widmaier pulls a small circular container labeled 1314 from a refrigerator. Some white blobs of yeast cling to its sides. Every four hours, the yeast doubles, he says, and when it's ready it will go into a fermenter down the hall, where it will be shaken and stirred, in a process similar to brewing beer (but with oxygen added to keep it from becoming alcoholic). "It's making silk of some sort," he says with a shrug, noting that Bolt Threads' data system tracks exactly what's going on in the thousands of strains the company has tested to date. "One of the coolest things about this is that it's self-replicating," he says. "It eats sugar, which costs about 10 cents a pound."
Welcome to the world of biomaterials, where entrepreneurs with Ph.D.s in chemistry can order up DNA, grow yeast in small containers, and create lab-made versions of proteins in nature, such as the dragline silk of a giant spider known technically as argiope bruehnicci. One advantage of the lab-grown silk is that it can theoretically be altered into whatever consumers might need it to be--strong and soft and stretchy. While other spider-silk researchers have focused on military and medical applications, Bolt Threads is looking to use the material to make better clothing. The global fashion industry, at roughly $2.5 trillion, is giant and terrible for the environment: Low-cost synthetic fibers like polyester are polluting the oceans, and even natural fabrics like cotton require large tracts of land and chemicals to produce. Spider silk, by contrast, as a bio-material, is sustainable.
For decades, scientists and entrepreneurs have fantasized about creating lab-grown spider silk, which is touted as stronger than steel and softer than a cloud, but the reality hasn't lived up to the hype. Two decades ago, a Canadian firm developed a herd of spider silk-producing goats that got a lot of press, but it failed to bring its "biosteel" to market before going out of business in 2009. In 2015, Japan's Spiber partnered with The North Face on a "moon parka" made of its spider silk, but it was more art piece than consumer product. Germany's AMSilk created a biodegradable shoe with Adidas in 2016, but that company's focus today is on selling its biosilk to cosmetics companies, which use silk additives to give skin products their glow and shampoo its shine--a less risky, and decidedly less sexy, business. Engineered spider silk will eventually gain traction in the apparel industry, says Jens Klein, AMSilk's chief executive, "but I'm not going to make any promises that markets are this size and we're going to conquer 10% of that. One has to be realistic."
It's been head-bangingly slow for Bolt Threads, which since its launch nine years ago has produced and sold just a tiny number of ties and hats from its lab-grown spider silk, which it calls Microsilk. But Widmaier believes that his 130-person team has made the necessary scientific breakthroughs to start commercializing a lineup of lab-grown materials and that 2019 will be its breakout year. This year sales are expected to top $10 million--the majority from Best Made Co., a Brooklyn maker of sweaters, canvas bags and brightly colored $398 axes that Bolt Threads acquired last year to gain insight into fashion--but the big question is how much it can sell next year and how much of those sales will be from its own materials.
A lot of smart money is betting on its success: Bolt Threads has raised $213 million from investors that include Silicon Valley VC firms Formation 8, Founders Fund (Peter Thiel's firm) and Innovation Endeavors (founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt), as well as Baillie Gifford, the giant Edinburgh-based asset manager, at a valuation of more than $700 million. There haven't been any breakthroughs in textiles in decades, after all, and in an earlier era the inventors of Gore-Tex built W.L. Gore & Associates into a powerhouse with more than $3 billion in revenue. "We are tiny compared to what we can be," says cofounder Breslauer, the company's chief technology officer. "The trick here is that it is painful, slow science that costs real dollars and time."
Widmaier, 37, grew up in Seattle, the son of a biochemist and a pharmacist. His father gave him a compound microscope for his fifth birthday, and he spent hours peering in fascination at the structure of leaves. He studied chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Washington and thought he would become a drug designer as advances in genetic sequencing created new therapeutics. Instead, in 2004, he found himself studying spider silk in a Ph.D. program at the University of California, San Francisco, in a synthetic biology lab run by Chris Voigt, a young professor who built the lab from scratch. "It was this Cambrian explosion of ideas of what we could use biology for," says Voigt, who now teaches at MIT. Students were taking risks in ways that seem exciting and successful today but at the time were chaotic and messy. "When other faculty are saying 'He seems nuts and has no experience in the space,' it's going to attract a student who is a little bit crazy," he says.
Widmaier, a fast-talking extrovert with intense blue eyes, met the introverted Mirsky in that lab. They met Breslauer, then a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, studying the microfluidics of spider silk production, when he contacted them looking for silk protein for his work. The three bonded over their fascination with spider silk--a field so difficult that most researchers steered clear. "Smart people run away screaming," Widmaier says. "We have dogged persistence and not being smart enough to run away screaming."
In 2009, they launched the company as Refactored Materials--a clunky name that appealed to them as scientists--with the ambitious goal of developing spider silk based on insights they had gained from previous failures. "Entrepreneurs are risk takers. Dan and I are actually risk averse. We see things as science experiments," says Breslauer, a bespectacled scientist with restless energy. Spiders produce seven different types of silk, each with its own purpose. The first one of interest to them was dragline silk, the filament a spider extrudes when it rappels that's strong enough to let it dangle from branches and window frames. On a wall of Bolt Thread's offices is a graphic with lines of letters that read, in part, PGGQGPYGPSAAAA, the amino acid sequence of the protein that makes up the fiber of the spider they were studying.
In the early days, they studied actual spiders, seeking to understand their genomics and the material properties of their different types of silk. For a time, they had an office full of giant golden orb weaver spiders spinning webs off hula hoops they'd bought in San Francisco's Mission District one afternoon. But from the beginning, they knew they'd need to come up with a lab-based process of creating spider silk. Unlike silkworms, spiders can't be farmed, because they are territorial and cannibalistic.
The trio started the company with grants and, wary of failing in public, worked in stealth for the first five years. They got their first venture funding in 2011 when Steve Vassallo of Foundation Capital reached out on LinkedIn. The company has raised four rounds of funding since then to cover the research costs. To show investors its potential, Breslauer contacted Lillian Whipple, an elderly weaver known for working with special threads, and asked her to make something out of Bolt Threads' spider silk. She wove a small swatch. Later, she created miniature kimonos of silkworm silk, little pieces of art the company now displays, framed, in its office in homage to that history.
Getting the material to work hasn't been easy. Early feedback on one textile was that it looked like a sick animal; another one melted after a few days. During the final stages of testing the one they use now, Breslauer discovered a problem: The material shrank by roughly 40%. In spiders, the property is called supercontraction and is a subject of scientific study. Jamie Bainbridge, Bolt Threads' vice president of product development, who previously worked at Nike and Patagonia, looked to stabilize the yarn by blending it with other natural fibers. She succeeded with a wool blend, and again with a cellulose one, creating more appealing textiles that appeared to retain the properties of the spider silk.
Last year, Bolt Threads debuted its first product, a spider silk necktie with a retail price of $314, and it followed up with a hat, made of a blend of spider silk and Rambouillet wool, priced at $198; it produced and sold just 50 ties and 100 hats. "We always knew these were steps on the way to commercialization," says Sue Levin, the company's chief commercial officer. Bolt Threads announced an early partnership with outdoor apparel maker Patagonia in 2016, which gave it credibility in the market, but nothing has come of that venture to date. Patagonia needs thousands of units to launch a new product, Levin notes, a scale that's still in the future for Bolt Threads. This year, Levin has been flying around the globe, talking with potential partners in an effort to get a breakout deal for its new materials.
Designer Stella McCartney, who has made sustainability a focus of her business and who has created one-off designs from Bolt Threads materials that have been showcased in museum exhibits, is slated to incorporate Bolt Threads' silk-cellulose blend into her women's clothing next year. Meanwhile, earlier this year, Bolt Threads added faux leather to its portfolio, made from mycelium, the roots of a mushroom, through a partnership with Ecovative, a startup cofounded by Forbes 30 Under 30 alum Eben Bayer. After some prototyping difficulties, it expects to launch those Mylo bags designed by Portland-based Chester Wallace, which sells its own canvas tote bags and backpacks, in September.
Meanwhile, Widmaier has a third lab-grown material based on another protein in the works that he won't identify yet but that he says will be completely different from the first two and will launch in 2019. After that, he figures, Bolt Threads will roll out new materials based on proteins in nature. "We knew if you could make one thing, you could make a platform of things," he says. "That's super cool."
Proteins are everywhere in nature, from rubbers to adhesives, and Widmaier believes they could be grown in the lab with a process similar to that of spider silk. It's proteins that give corals their colors, cause barnacles to stick to the hulls of ships, and give squid beaks their characteristic hardness. Designing the first spider silk took years, but Bolt Threads is getting faster and expects to accelerate the pace of new product launches.
"I think they are already well ahead of the field in terms of the systems they have in place and what they can do," says David Kaplan, director of Tufts' Bioengineering and Biotechnology Center and an advisor to the company since the early days.
Today, Bolt Threads' silk costs more than $100 per kilo, making it pricier than high-quality natural silk from silkworms, which goes for between $60 and $100 per kilo. But the company believes it can get the cost down to a comparable level at commercial scale--and that eventually it can push it below $40 per kilo. While its bio-based materials, made from biological and renewable inputs, will never compete with polyester just on cost, there may be additional potential based on their versatility. Bolt Threads might be able to engineer a stretchy, biodegradable textile for yoga clothes or a material that's warmer and lighter weight for jackets. "Now that we understand how these proteins and natural materials are made, we can tune materials' properties that don't necessarily exist in nature," says Aaron VanDevender, Founders Fund's chief scientist. "We believe we could actually have a branded product that could sell at a higher price."
In the meantime, Widmaier and Breslauer spend a lot of time thinking about how to scale production. A short walk from Bolt Thread's headquarters sits an old warehouse building, marked simply #58. Inside the 16,000-square-foot space, a few professional-grade knitting machines and sewing machines have been set up. The company plans to use the space as a showroom and mini-factory, with textiles in one room and artificial leather in the other. The space is big enough to make metric tons of fiber each year, enough for tens of thousands of shirts. "Every time we put something up for sale, it's gone almost immediately," Widmaier says, snapping his fingers. To become a real business, Bolt Threads will need to sell more than a few hundred hats or ties. "For us," he says, "the scale-up is probably harder than the science."
Reach Amy Feldman at afeldman@forbes.com. Cover image of Bolt Threads cofounders Dan Widmaier (left) and David Breslauer (right) by Timothy Archibald for Forbes.
