Melonfrost
2 known investors
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Also known as Melonfrost, Inc.
Investors · 2
Also in the syndicate · 1
Company profile
researched Aug 2026Melonfrost is a Brooklyn, New York-based company that combines proprietary software and hardware to steer microbial evolution in an automated closed loop. Its stated aim is to provide a method for designing and producing new microbes at scale for applications spanning food, energy, therapeutics and synthetic materials, framed by the company as growing rather than engineering biological products.
The platform has two core components. Maia is a software suite of machine learning algorithms that learn how organisms evolve in response to different selection pressures and environmental conditions as they relate to measured phenotypes, and that iteratively output instructions specifying further selection pressures to develop desired traits such as yield or frost resistance. The Evolution Reactor is the hardware apparatus that individually controls, measures and applies these encoded selection pressures across thousands of independent microbial populations following parallel evolutionary trajectories. The reactor is built as an array of modular units, each holding roughly 250 individual microbial populations. Cloud software connects the two, feeding hardware measurements into the models and returning updated instructions to the hardware, iterating until a target phenotype is reached. As of January 2023 the system fit within the company's Brooklyn lab space, with a longer-term vision of an Evolution Reactor warehouse operating as a "biological data center."
Founding story
Co-founder and CEO Sam Levin has described the company name as deriving from family history: his grandfather, a fifth-generation potato farmer in Western Massachusetts, turned to melon seeds brought from Puerto Rico that grew well in the region's sandy loam soil, only for a frost to kill the crop before harvest. Levin frames the company's purpose as no longer being at the whim of such disasters — metaphorically making frost-hardy melons for a desired use. Levin co-founded the company with childhood friend Loren Amdahl-Culleton, Head of Engineering & Design; in high school the two started a farm supplying their school cafeteria. They studied evolutionary dynamics and reinforcement learning respectively, at Oxford and Stanford, and noted the potential to fill gaps in evolutionary models with machine learning tools given similarities in the underlying mathematics. The company was founded together with two other childhood friends.
Traction
Melonfrost announced a $7 million seed round in January 2023, intended to fund the next phase of building out Evolution Reactor hardware and to move the company toward its first customer in the edible fats space of the food sector. At that time the full system approximately fit within the company's Brooklyn lab space.
Latest developments
In January 2023 the company disclosed a $7 million seed round co-led by Refactor Capital and Alexandria Venture Investments, earmarked for further Evolution Reactor hardware development and progress toward a first customer in edible fats. In February 2023, CEO Sam Levin appeared on the Not Boring Founders podcast series to discuss the company.
▸Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market, geography
Market position
The company positions itself against existing strain-development approaches that are constrained by scale, creating a bottleneck between an edited strain and a commercialized one, and that typically rely on relatively expensive, brute-force guess-and-check methods based on mutations to a genetic sequence. Its underlying thesis, as stated by its CEO, is that evolution remains the best designer of organisms.
Technology
The technology pairs the Evolution Reactor, a modular hardware array in which each unit holds approximately 250 individual microbial populations and applies controlled selection pressures while measuring results, with Maia, a machine learning software suite that models how organisms evolve under given selection pressures and environmental conditions relative to measured phenotypes. Cloud software closes the loop between them: measurements from hardware update the models, and the models return new selection-pressure instructions to the hardware, repeating until the desired phenotypic goal is achieved. The approach selects on phenotype rather than relying on the mutation-based, guess-and-check genetic-sequence editing methods the company characterizes as expensive and comparatively brute force.
Go-to-market
Industrial biotechnology and bioproduction customers across food, energy, therapeutics and synthetic materials; the company's first targeted customer was in the edible fats segment of the food sector.
Geography
Headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, United States, where the company operates its laboratory.
Compiled by commissioned research from 6 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.
Timeline · 2
launches, deals, and filingsCo-founder and CEO Sam Levin appeared in a Not Boring Founders episode published on the Age of Miracles podcast feed hosted by Packy McCormick.
Seed round of $7 million co-led by Refactor Capital and Alexandria Venture Investments, to fund the next phase of Evolution Reactor hardware buildout and progress toward a first customer in the edible fats space of the food sector.
$7M source ↗
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
▸Research sources · 6
primary sources listed
- Melonfrostmelonfrost.com · web
6 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Melonfrost do?
- Brooklyn biotech combining machine learning software and automated reactor hardware to steer microbial evolution at scale.
- Who are Melonfrost's investors?
- Melonfrost's investors include HAWKTAIL.