This Scientist-Turned-Entrepreneur Raised $46 Million To Create Sustainable Dyes For The Textile Industry Using Synthetic Biology
Some founders enter entrepreneurship gradually. Others leap from one world into another. Orr Yarkoni’s path started in academic research and went on to building Colorifix, one of the world’s most ambitious biotech-textile companies that radically reframed how biology can power industry.
From his early fascination with living systems to raising $46M and building a breakthrough technology now used in global supply chains, Orr’s journey reflects what happens when deep science aligns with hard-earned entrepreneurial instinct.
This is the story of how a molecular biologist turned a scientific insight into a company that reshaped one of the world’s most polluting industries. In this engrossing interview, Orr talks about navigating barriers to entry, scaling up versus numbering up, and raising funding from VCs and strategics.
Roots in Nature: Understanding Life Through DNA
Orr was born in Israel before his family relocated to Portugal when he was just two. By the time he reached his teens, his obsession with living things, animals, ecosystems, and biological processes had crystallized into a professional calling.
“I wanted to understand nature better, and particularly nature’s language, which is DNA.” That drive led Orr to the UK at 18, where he completed an undergraduate degree, a PhD at Newcastle, and eventually a postdoc at Cambridge.
Orr was keenly interested in molecular biology, synthetic biology, and understanding how to work with nature's own processes to make things. He worked on interfacing cells in the environment via biosensors for several years.
Then, Orr met his future co-founder, Jim Ajioka, while working on biosensors that detect the impact of the textile industry on environmental contaminants in the water. The duo came up with the idea of using SynBio to develop colors for fabrics, rather than to measure water pollution.
This research—engineering microorganisms to communicate with their environment—sparked two important realizations:
Synthetic biology could be used not just to measure pollution, but to prevent it. · To create real change, the science needed a business model.
That second insight triggered a career-altering shift, from researching to starting a business, which Orr recalls wasn’t an easy decision.
From Academia to Entrepreneurship: Doing Good by Doing Well
Orr’s biosensor work was academically successful but commercially doomed. The product was good and a perfect fit for its purpose, but the market didn’t exist. There was just no financial incentive to move forward with it.
Orr quickly realized that, although they were making low-cost sensors to help people monitor water quality, no one would make money selling the product. “To do good, you must also do well. For something to be sustainable, it has to be financially sustainable, not just environmentally viable.”
That belief pushed Orr away from the security of academia and into the uncharted waters of startup building. But first came the humbling realization that he needed to learn how companies actually work.
Orr realized that building a company was a step-by-step process, requiring different levels of commitment from not just himself, but also the people around him. There was only so much he could achieve by himself. He needed to surround himself with the right people.
Orr credits his co-founder with helping and guiding him through the process, enabling him to become the company's CEO. He read the UK Companies Act 2006 cover to cover and studied the obligations of directors.
Orr approached entrepreneurship with the same rigor and perspective he once applied to molecular biology. “In my mind, I was still doing research, just not into science anymore.” The process wasn’t smooth sailing, and he concedes they made mistakes along the way.
Early Missteps: The Patent Trap That Delays Founders
Once they had the technology ready, Orr and Jim started by filing for the patent and acquired the search examiner's report. Next, they began looking for investors, when they should have developed a minimum value proposition and tested it on customers.
It took Orr and Jim time to secure the first customer willing to test the solution, and even longer to convert that into investor traction. Thus, Colorifix materialized in 2016. But those early learnings became foundational pillars:
Validate with customers early. · Don’t over-rotate on technology. · Build slowly, but deliberately. · Surround yourself with the right people.
The Birth of Colorifix: Letting Biology Make the Colors
The idea behind Colorifix is elegantly radical. It involves modifying microorganisms to produce colorants and dyes for use in textiles. The key difference is in the technique that uses nature’s way, rather than manufacturing chemicals that destroy ecosystems.
Borrow color from nature: If you take the vibrant blue from a parrot’s feathers, you can identify the DNA sequences responsible for that hue. · Transfer that DNA message into microorganisms: The microbes become tiny biological dye factories. They make the same color the parrot makes, similar to how the parrot makes it, starting with sugar and nitrogen and building the chemistry. · Ferment microbes like beer. Except that, instead of alcohol, the output is pigment. · Apply the fermentation biomass mixture directly to the fabric: The microbes naturally bind and fix the dye into the textile—eliminating the need for toxic chemical baths.
At Colorifix, they change how dyes are applied to fabrics, thus rewriting the rules of how color enters supply chains. As a result, this cuts:
77% of water consumption · Significant CO₂ emissions · Energy usage across the board
The Barriers to Entry: Regulation, Scale, and Standardization
Colorifix’s technology is a GMO process that produces a non-GM output, a regulatory complexity that almost no one in the textile industry had dealt with before.
Regulatory Bottlenecks: To operate in any region, Colorifix must acquire local GMO licenses. And every new customer means a new regulatory cycle. For instance, in the EU, it’s ~45 days, while in Turkey, it’s up to 270 days. Each time a new customer is onboarded using the process, Colorifix must engage the entire regulatory process. Navigating administrative procedures and successfully submitting applications is highly challenging the first time around, because few applications for distributed SynBio exist. · On-Site Standardization: Dye houses are operated by machine technicians, not fermentation scientists. Colorifix had to make the cutting-edge biological process simple enough for a non-technical, machine operator to replicate with precision and achieve consistent, reproducible results. The company had to get the processes to take place in the customer’s dye house using the existing labor, infrastructure, and processes. · Proving the Full Spectrum: It wasn’t enough to produce one good blue. Textile customers demanded dozens of colors, all of which met strict safety and performance tests and specifications.
Navigating the Proof of Concept
Each stage of growth and breakthrough unlocked a new milestone:
The first reasonable piece of fabric dyed soaked up the color with perfectly clear spent liquid · Passing all industry metrics, including quality and safety · Scaling from grams → kilos → hundreds of kilos → tons
That climb, Orr notes, was steep. Colorifix had to build a product portfolio that met customer needs and could be tested at a meaningful scale. After the first commercial production pilot trial, the customer would have to have the capital expenditure (CapEx) in place.
If they didn’t, the process involved time lapses, extensive planning, and handholding to get things right. Having provided the proof of concept, Orr and Jim had to raise more money to progress to the next step in scale.
The Fundraising Journey: From Seed Struggles to $46M Raised
As Orr recalls, their first funding round enabled them to develop a product that passed all the metrics to enter the market. They also convinced customers to do on-site trials. The next fundraise helped install equipment so customers could work with the technology and provide feedback.
The next funding round took Colorifix to the next level of scale, enabling industrial-scale production of tons per batch rather than tens to hundreds of kilos. Colorifix raised a combined $46M, moving from small angels and early VCs to major strategic players like H&M and IKEA.
Storytelling is everything that Orr Yarkoni was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley legend (see it here) where the most critical slides are highlighted.
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But landing the first lead investor—the one who anchors a round—was the hardest part. Colorifix’s first funding round was led by Sagana, an impact venture capitalist (VC). Interestingly, the folks at Sagana convinced Orr and Jin to revisit H&M’s proposal to work together.
Working with Strategics vs. Venture Capitalists (VC)
Initially, the duo was hesitant to align closely with a big brand at an early stage. Orr and Jim had concerns about being siloed and the potential exclusivity. However, H&M convinced them that there would be no commercial tie-in.
Thus, H&M became one of Colorifix’s strongest allies, introducing them to manufacturers, customers, and global fashion leaders. It’s now one of their most valuable relationships. As Orr reveals, H&M has helped them understand the product-market fit and promoted their technology to other brands.
This experience taught Orr the value of working with strategics, as long as their interests aligned with your own company in the deal. He points out that strategics take a different approach than other financial players, such as VCs and private equity firms. But it makes sense to partner with a blend.
Strategics have a higher level of scrutiny and focus on technology and product performance rather than projections and the total addressable market (TAM). They envision how the technology will fit into their systems and how it can also work for competitors.
Strategics ensure that the product's quality, specs, and scalability match their needs. They regularly come across several great solutions that don’t work at scale or at the price/cost point vis-à-vis the market they’re targeting. Their job is to separate the viable ideas from the duds.
Unlike VCs, strategics focus on the revenues in the initial three to five years. In contrast, VCs are more focused on revenue projections. This is why Orr prefers to work with both sides on every funding round.
Participation from VCs and strategics, and then partnering with H&M and IKEA, brought validation by checking the numbers and the product, and ensuring alignment with Colorofix’s products and market potential.
The Vision for Colorifix
Nature—not petrochemicals—produces the colors on our clothes. Petrochemicals can perform specific functions that natural molecules cannot, which is why they are advantageous. But they should be used only where their value is exclusive, Orr opines. · Biological dyes replace a significant source of water pollution · Manufacturing shifts toward local, low-energy, low-carbon models
“If all industrial color were biological, that would be a great start,” Orr says.
Scaling Up vs. Numbering Up: A Core Strategic Decision
Colorifix faced one of the most fascinating strategic dilemmas. As Orr weighed their options, “Do we centralize and make a big fermentation center where we make huge vats of dyes and ship them all over the world? Or do we send fermenters all over the globe and ferment things locally?”
The first approach would entail shipping and downstream processing costs, as well as environmental impacts, in terms of CO2 emissions and water use, not to mention other unexpected overheads. The unit economics would also have to make sense.
Considering the value chain and market trends, which included greater vertical integration in the industry, the pressure shifted toward positioning the dying process as another step. Customers could produce the color they needed in-house rather than wait for shipping and handle other delays.
Orr and Jim factored in water savings and carbon footprint reductions and concluded there would be a positive impact on costs. Thus, they opted for the distributed approach. The next challenge focused on estimating optimal batch sizes for producing dyes for customers on-site.
Each customer has different dye houses, some handling 10 tons of fabric a day and others 600 tons. A modular approach was needed that could accommodate small, medium, and, particularly, large customers.
Colorifix needed to standardize and modularize the process to enable its tech support team to serve every customer. This factor underscored Orr’s vision of scaling their processes.
Overcoming Challenges on a Global Scale
Orr talks about the key challenges they faced, particularly from the tech and regulatory perspectives. The challenge of obtaining licenses across the geographies where Colorifix operates still stands. Not all countries adopt GM processes or integrate them into their targeted industries.
Colorifix is seeking to penetrate geographical markets where brands already have supply chains. As Orr points out, it can take a large brand up to 2 years to onboard a new supplier and walk them through all the steps and accreditation before they can start supplying at volume.
Colorifix must onboard players into the supply chain rather than trying to change it to work with its existing partners. Choosing the right partners and betting on the right players in the supply chain were key to determining the next steps.
The Hidden Realities of Fashion: What Everyone Gets Wrong
Orr is blunt, “There’s too much that we think is right that is wrong.” From sustainability impact numbers to assumptions about production, the industry suffers from misinformation. His most important point: Sustainability is driven by consumers, not brands.
Brands can influence choice by offering better products, but consumers ultimately dictate what gets made, worn, and disposed of. Orr hopes for stronger anti-greenwashing regulations to create more honest consumer decision-making. “We consume too much,” he says.
A Founder’s Mindset: Patience, Long-Term Vision, and Color
When asked what color is most underrated in nature and in fashion, Orr doesn’t hesitate: “Yellow. I love yellow. It brings things to life.” Green and blue are colors that signify nature, but they are also the hardest to achieve with natural dyes. Yellow is a delightful summer-to-early-autumn color.
Orr’s advice to young founders? “You’re going to have to be a lot more patient—with everything, including yourself. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
Colorifix is proving that synthetic biology isn’t just a lab tool—it’s an industrial force. And if Orr Yarkoni has his way, the colors of the future won’t come from chemistry, but from life itself.
Orr Yarkoni transitioned from academia to entrepreneurship after realizing that environmental impact must be paired with financial sustainability to endure.
Colorifix uses engineered microorganisms to produce natural dyes, dramatically reducing water, energy, and emissions in the textile dyeing process. · Early on, the team made the classic mistake of chasing investors after a patent, rather than validating with customers and proving a real market need. · Regulatory hurdles around GMO processes and the need to simplify biotech for non-scientist dye-house operators created major barriers to entry—and a strong moat. · Colorifix chose “numbering up” (distributed, on-site fermentation at dye houses) instead of “scaling up” in a central plant, aligning unit economics with sustainability and supply-chain resilience. · Blending VCs with strategic investors like H&M and IKEA gave Colorifix both financial backing and deep market validation without sacrificing independence. · Orr reminds founders that building climate-scale solutions is a marathon, not a sprint, and that patience—with the market and with yourself—is essential.
Original Version
Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone and welcome to the DealMaker Show. So today we have an amazing guest you know joining us. you know We're gonna be talking quite a bit about barriers to entry, scaling up versus numbering up, you know which is quite a unique topic. And then also the the fundraising process, you know whether you're raising from VCs, the strategics, you know the angles, the perspectives,
Alejandro Cremades: the roles, building, scaling, financing, all the good stuff that we like to hear. But without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Or Yarkoni. Welcome to the show.
Alejandro Cremades: So originally born in Israel, but then, you know, you you kind of like moved in a little bit all over the place, Portugal, the UK. Give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you?
Orr Yarkoni: So as you said, I was born in Israel when I was very young, two years of age, my parents moved to Portugal where they raised me and my sister. At age 18, I moved to the UK for the university.
Orr Yarkoni: And I ended up doing my undergraduate through a PhD in the UK in and Newcastle, and then moved on to Cambridge where I did my postdoc and met my co-founder, Jim Adjioca.
Alejandro Cremades: So tell us about the whole research and more like the technical side of you. How did you get into this whole you know segment to begin with?
Orr Yarkoni: So I was always very passionate about nature and particularly living things from an early age. I always loved animals. And when I got into my teens, I really committed that I wanted to get to understand nature better and particularly nature's language, which is DNA.
Orr Yarkoni: And that's what made me go into molecular biology and then synthetic biology and understanding how to work with nature's own processes to make things. um Then I worked on interfacing cells in the environment through biosensors for a number of years.
Orr Yarkoni: which is how I met my co-founder, Jim, working on a biosensor for water quality. And through that work, we became aware of how much impact the textile industry actually has on the environment, particularly on water and pollution.
Orr Yarkoni: And we decided how it would be great to use Symbio to actually make the colors and put color on fabrics rather than measure how much pollution is going into the water to begin with.
Alejandro Cremades: So how big of a decision was that? Because, I mean, up until that point, you were pretty much academia, researching, PhD, you know, all of that good stuff. So it's quite the shift, you know, from that to wanting to start a business.
Orr Yarkoni: Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to say it was easy. um it was a difficult decision. But one of the learnings for me from the work with biosensors was that we were developing products that were really good and they were fit for purpose, but they didn't really have a market, meaning there was no financial incentive to do it.
Orr Yarkoni: So were making really low-cost sensors to help people monitor the quality of their water, but no one was going to make money by selling those things. And that really drove me the further the to the realization that to do good, you must also do well. And for something to be sustainable, it has to be financially sustainable, not just environmentally sustainable.
Orr Yarkoni: Right. And that was one of the big drivers to go into actually to go into business and to shift mindset from academia and developing products that were for a good purpose to to developing a product that solves a problem and does so in a way that perpetuates its impact on the environment, meaning people earn money doing it.
Alejandro Cremades: And what about the whole journey of um putting together technology you know for what ended up becoming you know the company, but then spinning it out and going at it with building it? I mean, what what does that journey look like?
Orr Yarkoni: again, it's very much step by step and it requires different levels of commitment from you and from those around you because ultimately it's going be very seldom that you can achieve that much by yourself.
Orr Yarkoni: So it starts with surrounding yoursels with yourself with the right people. um And again, very thankful for my co-founder to help me and guide me through some of the steps and to give me the opportunity to step up and be the CEO as he used to be my boss. You have to keep that in mind.
Orr Yarkoni: um But from there, understanding what it means to run a company, um in my case, reading the UK Companies Act 2006 and understanding all the obligations of being a director and all those things. And essentially, I approached it from a perspective of,
Orr Yarkoni: I'm doing research, just not into science. I'm learning how to do those things. So it requires that commitment to understand your role, what's expected of you and how you can best serve the company in that role.
Orr Yarkoni: And then from there, we made a few mistakes. I'd say the first one was once we had the technology down and we filed for the patent and got the search examiner report, we're like, okay, we have a technology now we need investors.
Orr Yarkoni: And what you should be doing is, okay, now we have ah a minimum value proposition. Now we need to find a test it with the customer. So that took us a little bit of time to get that in place, which is why the company started 2016 and sixteen it took us time to get that first funding was, you know, learning the ropes of being a first time entrepreneur, setting up the company, running it and eventually getting that customer and eventually investor traction.
Alejandro Cremades: So for a color fix, you know, so that people get it, what ended up becoming the company? I mean, how' what's the business model?
Orr Yarkoni: So what we do is we modify microorganisms to produce colorants, dye stuffs for use in textiles. um We basically make them to make the same colors you see in nature. So if you take a parrot, for instance, we could find DNA off the tail end of the parrot.
Orr Yarkoni: And from there, find the message, make that color put into our microorganisms. We'll make the same color the parrot makes the same way that the parrot makes it, starting from sugar and nitrogen and building all of the chemistry.
Orr Yarkoni: We then ferment that microbe, much like the way you make beer, but instead of making alcohol, you're making the dye stuffs. And then we apply all of that mixture, the biomass dye stuff and water from fermentation onto the fabric and the microbes transfer and fix the dyes into the fabric. So not only you're replacing how the dyes are being made,
Orr Yarkoni: You're changing how they're being put on the fabric and removing all of the chemistry that's normally associated with dying. And that allows you to save 77% water, um award of on emissions, and depending on what you're dying, between and on energy.
Alejandro Cremades: And then when you guys say were putting together the business, you know what were some of the biggest barriers you know to entry that that you were encountering?
Orr Yarkoni: Well, firstly, it's a GM technology to begin with. So the process we're talking about is a GMO process that makes a non-GM product. That means anywhere that we're applying it, we need to get a local license and work with local governments.
Orr Yarkoni: And in some countries, particularly in the EU, you're looking at about 45 days turnaround from applying for a license to getting it. Somewhere like Turkey can take up to 270 days for that application to go through.
Orr Yarkoni: So every time we onboard a customer towards using the process, you have to engage in that long regulatory cycle. And navigating that the first time around and getting a successful application through isn't simple, as there aren't many applications for distributed SynBio, really, in the world.
Orr Yarkoni: So that was the first one. Second one, setting up everything for scaling and getting these processes to take place in a die house to make use of all the existing labor and infrastructure and processes that's in place at the customer side.
Orr Yarkoni: We need to standardize a lot of elements there and simplify them for use by non-fermentation scientists. right We want people who are machine operators to use this equipment.
Alejandro Cremades: So then when it comes to really putting together the proof of concept, you know how was that like and and at what point do you guys feel like you're starting to turn a corner and that this could be something something interesting?
Orr Yarkoni: So Unfortunately, I think the message is there's too much that we think we know that we don't. There's so much that we assume is the status quo that isn't the status quo.
Orr Yarkoni: And we consume too much, all of that. So too much.
Alejandro Cremades: Well, one question that comes to mind as you're saying this is, as so you can, let's say anyone goes out there in nature, you know, what would you say is one color that one could find that is totally underrated that you wish people would use more?
Orr Yarkoni: That's a great question as well. So everywhere you look around you, um first of all, nature is symbolized with green, and we think of nature in the ocean as blue. So green and blue are the two colors that you see most associated with natural.
Orr Yarkoni: Those are also two of the hardest colors to get to perform that are natural dyes as an interesting aside. But if you walk into most rooms, most fabric today is black, blue, or white. So anywhere you go, if you look at what people are wearing, I've just described 70% of apparel in any room you walk into.
Orr Yarkoni: And one color I see underloved is yellow. And i personally love yellow, as I'm sure you can see.
Orr Yarkoni: and And would love to see more of it. It's a lot of people think of it as a summer to early autumn color, but I think it brings a lot of things to life.
Alejandro Cremades: That's amazing. So let's say, or I put you into a time machine. And let's say i bring you back in time to that moment where you are, you know, meeting for the first time, Jim, and you guys are...
Alejandro Cremades: wondering about a world where you could, you know, bring something of your own to life. And let's say you're able to have a chat with that younger Orr and perhaps that younger Jim, and you're able to give those younger guys one piece of advice, you know, back then in 2016, when you guys were thinking about launching this. And let's say you're able to give those younger guys one piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why, given what you know now?
Orr Yarkoni: You're going to have to be a lot more patient with everything, including yourself, to make this work.
Alejandro Cremades: very profound. Or, you know, as they say, it's a marathon and not ah not a sprint. but Or it has been an absolute honor, I guess, for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say, hi, what is the best way for them to do so?
Alejandro Cremades: Easy enough. Well, Orr, thank you so much for being on the Dealmaker Show today. It has been an honor to have you with us.
