12 August 2021
First published by Singapore Business Times on 12 August 2021
Lin Fengru, the 33-year-old co-founder and chief executive of Singapore biotechnology start-up TurtleTree, remembers the doubters in the investor community and their barbs when she started out.
Set up in 2019, TurtleTree is a new start-up pushing the biotechnology innovation envelope, and she and her business partner Max Rye’s self-imposed goal was to transform one of the world’s staple foods – milk – using a production process that bucks traditional methods and promises to overcome a bugbear of dairy farming: sustainability.
In simple terms, TurtleTree makes mammalian milk without the mammals. Its multiple cell agriculture platforms replicate the processes that happen on a cellular level when milk is made naturally in living mammals such as cows and humans. Cells are collected from mammalian milk and put into TurtleTree’s patented lactation media, which subsequently gets converted into milk.
However, the two do not come with deep biotechnology backgrounds.
“A lot of investors would ask me and Max: ‘You guys are business people so what business do you have running a biotech company?’ One even told us that he’d only invest if we hired a Nobel Laureate on our team,” she says.
Success and innovation
What does it take to be successful and how do we navigate key moments in our lives? We explore stories of success and innovation around the world.
For further information, please contact:
Amarjit Kaur, Withersworldwide
amarjitkaur@witherskhattarwong.com