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With multi-billion-dollar industries of crop protection, nutrition, and personal care under pressure from geopolitical and environmental instability, Anomaly Bio is programming biology to build the next generation of ingredients from the ground-up.
SINGAPORE — Singapore-based biotech startup Anomaly Bio has raised US$2.6 million (S$3.37 million) in pre-seed funding led by SF-based Pebblebed Ventures, with participation from Akshay Kothari (Notion), Sean Hunt (Solugen), Eben Bayer (Ecovative), and Mithun Sacheti (CaratLane) amongst others.
Around the world, ingredient supply chains are cracking under pressure from geopolitical and environmental shocks. Tariffs, wars, pandemics, and droughts have turned once-reliable systems into an unpredictable patchwork of delays and shortages that threaten everyday essentials.
From vanilla crops in Madagascar destroyed by cyclones to fertilizer and grain shortages triggered by the Russia–Ukraine war, disruptions have rippled through global markets, driving record price volatility in commodities such as cocoa, palm oil, corn, and sugarcane. These are not isolated events, but symptoms of a deeper structural fragility in the global supply system.
Anomaly’s solution turns microbes into micro-factories that replace fragile supply chains with a new form of manufacturing that is scalable, on demand, and viable anywhere in the world. By engineering microbes to convert sugar into bio-based ingredients, Anomaly aims to unlock new possibilities within crop protection, nutrition, personal care and beyond.
“As the world’s ingredient landscape transforms, we want to build a global ingredients company from the ground up,” said Armaan. “There is a rare opportunity to stand alongside legacy industry leaders, but powered by synthetic biology and advanced fermentation.”
Armaan and Samyak met in 2022 during their freshman week at the National University of Singapore. Originally from India, both relocated on the S&T Scholarship and NUSC International Scholarship respectively. Their breakthrough came in 2023 when they received a grant from PM Lawrence Wong at the Singapore–India Hackathon under India’s G20 initiatives.
Before this fundraise, Anomaly Bio received over US$120,000 in non-dilutive awards from MIT’s WFA Prize 2025 and the WTFund Fellowship, alongside support from NUS and Mars Petcare’s Next Generation Pet Food Program.
Armaan previously interned at a Church Lab spinoff at MIT, while Samyak spent a semester at Princeton University.
The global economic order is under strain. As Singapore DPM Mr. Gan Kim Yong recently highlighted, rising protectionism and the fragmentation of global trade threaten the very interdependence that once powered global prosperity. His call for “flexible multilateralism” underscores Singapore’s vision of a rules-based yet resilient global economy.
Anomaly Bio views its work as part of Singapore’s broader push to strengthen advanced manufacturing. Through on-demand and scalable ingredient production powered by biotechnology, the company aims to help build sustainable and reliable manufacturing capabilities that enhance, not replace, global trade networks.
“With a government that’s proactively supporting advanced biomanufacturing, we believe that Singapore is the right ecosystem to build a truly global bio-ingredient company,” Samyak said.
The new funding will enable Anomaly Bio to set up its own laboratory and pilot-scale facilities in Singapore, alongside expanding its R&D team in metabolic engineering. Explore open roles [here].
Anomaly Bio is a Singapore-based company developing next-generation bio-based inputs through advanced fermentation and strain engineering. The company designs optimized metabolic pathways in microorganisms to convert readily available feedstocks, such as sugars, into high-value molecules for applications in crop protection, nutrition, and personal care. By transforming microbes into efficient cell factories, Anomaly replaces fragile supply chains with scalable, on-demand, and globally viable biomanufacturing to redefine how essential ingredients are made.
Pebblebed Ventures backs technical founders building the foundational layers of progress. Guided by a philosophy of supporting teams that find elegance in complexity and possibility in constraints, Pebblebed works hands-on with founders from company formation through scale. Representative investments include Augment, KREA, OpenMind, Orchid, Zeromatter, Lemurian Labs, and Logical Intelligence. The team brings deep experience from leading organizations at the frontier of technology, including the founding of OpenAI, leadership of AI at Stripe, the creation of Facebook AI Research, and investing experience at Sequoia.