Who’s the Fairest Surfactant of All? The Ruby Bio Story, and the Science of Suds

Queen Business-as-Usual loved her mirror. It gleamed, polished to perfection with petrochemical surfactants. She had a clean fetish, and this mirror was her pride — her proof that no molecule could be fairer than hers.

Every morning she would ask: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest surfactant of all?”

And every morning the mirror would reply: “Yours, my Queen. Always yours.”

Until one day, it didn’t.

The mirror whispered instead: “Ruby Bio’s is the fairest of all.”

The Queen, enraged, summoned her faithful Huntsman. “Go into the magical forest,” she ordered. “Find this Ruby Bio, kill it, and bring me back only its IP.”

So the Huntsman went — into a forest where nothing behaved as it should. Oil droplets sank instead of floated. Biobased companies rose quickly instead of slowly. Feedstock sets expanded instead of narrowing.  And in a clearing, fermenters bubbled not with beer but with soap-like molecules — surfactants sinking neatly to the bottom, waiting to be scooped up. The Huntsman had not the heart to kill Ruby Bio, which leads us to our story today.

From Flask to Factory

That strange sinking oil droplet, first spotted almost a decade ago in experiments at UC Davis, grew into Ruby Bio via a licensing deal not long ago. The company has rapidly turned the inversion into an industrial advantage: instead of fighting to pull products out of broth, its yeast politely sends them to the bottom. In chemicals, that’s not whimsy — these are the brutish economics of surfactants. Make ’em cheap and mighty effective.

The road from lab to market ran through the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit (ABPDU) at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. ABPDU is where unconventional microbes prove they can scale. Ruby’s yeast did, moving from 10 liters to 300 liters to 5,000 liters in just a few years.

“Everything worked flawlessly,” CTO Pavan Kambam said of those early scale-up runs. The milestone gave Ruby something rare in biobased surfactants: demonstration material at commercial volumes. That let customers test laundry detergents, emulsifiers, and other applications with their own hands — and kept Ruby from getting stuck in the valley of “almost.”

Today Ruby samples at kilo scale and is working with partners across detergents, food ingredients, and polymers. CEO Charlie Silver keeps it simple: “It’s like fermenting beer — only the yeast are tuned to make chemicals instead of alcohol.”

Cheaper Sugar, Better Suds

Performance is only half the story. The other half is cost — and it’s where most bio-based surfactant startups faltered. When oil prices dipped, petrochemical products looked cheaper and customers bolted.

Ruby designed around that trap. Instead of starting with palm oil, Ruby starts with sugar — five to ten times cheaper. The yeast then builds the carbon chains itself, avoiding the volatility of palm entirely.

The real kicker is downstream. Where ethanol demands heavy distillation and most fermentation products cling stubbornly to their broth, Ruby’s molecules sink. They’re easy to scoop and polish, so the process avoids the capital and operating costs that haunt others.

As Kambam put it: “There is really not much of a downstream processing because the product just settles to the bottom.”

That inversion — oil droplets going down instead of up — is the trick that makes Ruby competitive even when oil is cheap. No “bio premium,” no asking customers to pay extra just to feel good. Ruby’s economics are as clean as its product.

Residues to Rubies

That cost edge sharpens with Ruby’s feedstock strategy. Right now, the company runs on corn sugar. But with fresh funding, it’s dipping deeper into the forest.

In August, Ruby won a $157,722 USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Small Business grant to unlock waste sugars. Think molasses, waste glycerol, lignocellulosics — the byproducts and side streams that usually feed furnaces, not fermenters.

The grant supports CRISPR knock-outs to reduce side products and fermentation tweaks to lift yields. The goal is simple: prove that residues can replace corn and cane at commercial scale. If Ruby succeeds, it will move beyond $0.25 dextrose into the magical kingdom of 10¢ sugars — residues so cheap they could make build, own, and operatefacilities far more feasible in the long term.

This broader feedstock palette does more than cut costs. It diversifies supply chains, insulating Ruby from shocks in corn and cane markets. It also opens the door to co-location: partnering with facilities already producing side streams or lower-value intermediates, then turning those streams into a molecule of choice. Imagine a glycerol-rich biorefinery or a nut processor in the San Joaquin Valley — Ruby could drop in fermentation tanks, spin side streams into surfactants, and ship product locally with minimal logistics overhead.

At the same time, a partnership with BEAM Circular, backed by California’s $10 million Jobs First initiative, connects Ruby to walnut and almond shells from the Central Valley. Those shells may soon fuel fermenters, turning local residues into detergents and emulsifiers for global brands.

Silver calls the product “transparent to the feedstock” — it performs the same whether the yeast is eating corn sugar, xylose, or molasses. That flexibility is a magic mirror of its own, showing which sugars are fairest of all: the cheapest, the most abundant, the most sustainable.

More Than Soap Bubbles

The surfactant market is Ruby’s first act, and it’s a $50 billion stage. But the platform can go far beyond soap bubbles.

• Food ingredients: Natural emulsifiers that improve shelf life and texture while meeting clean-label standards.
• Polyol sweeteners: Fermentation-based mannitol, erythritol, and arabitol, natural and non-GMO.
• Polymer building blocks: Bio-based monomers for polyurethanes, polyesters, and polyamides, all renewable and low-carbon.
• Oleochemicals: Medium- and long-chain fatty alcohols and acids, drop-in replacements for conventional petrochemicals.

The common thread: yeast as a factory, sugar as the feedstock, fermentation as the pathway, and molecules that settle politely at the bottom.

Seed investors are in, a Series A is coming, and new partnerships are expected. Ruby’s future looks less like a single product launch than a pipeline of molecules, each one a fresh challenge to Queen Business-as-Usual’s mirror.

Challenges Ahead

But fairy tales come with hurdles. For Ruby Bio, the path forward runs through Series A financing — raising the capital to move from pilot to full commercial scale. That means identifying not just customers but also partners and financiers willing to back a flagship facility. The company’s economics are strong on paper, but building a plant and filling it with real product will take more than a clean mirror and a clever yeast. Ruby needs to prove that its early partners will sign long-term offtake agreements, that investors will bet on its model, and that a commercial project can scale as smoothly as its pilot tanks.

It’s a challenge as old as the bioeconomy itself: turning suds into steel, and steel into sales.

Mirror, Mirror (Again)

And so the Huntsman returns from the forest, not with Ruby’s IP in a box, but with news the Queen can’t ignore: oil droplets that sink, residues that shine like rubies, costs that fall instead of climb.

Queen Business-as-Usual clutches her spotless mirror, polishes it one more time, and demands again: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest molecule of all?”

The mirror answers, clear as soap-bubble glass: “Ruby Bio.”

And in the forest, the fermenters keep bubbling — upside down, right side up, rewriting the fairy tale of surfactants.