Ankur Capital, Dare Ventures, Redstart, Zenfold Ventures, and Woodside Energy were among the investors in the $20 million Series B round that the biotech startup String Bio announced on Monday.

Additionally, the startup has a contract in place with Woodside Energy of Australia to create sustainable protein ingredients from greenhouse gases.

It claimed that the investment will support its decarbonization efforts and help it expand the market for its products.

String Bio, a Bengaluru-based company founded in 2012 by Ezhil Subbian and Vinod Kumar, uses biotechnology to create animal feed and food ingredients.

It makes high-quality next-generation ingredients for the agriculture, personal care, human nutrition, and animal nutrition sectors using methane as the raw material using its patented SIMP (String Integrated Methane Platform), which integrates fermentation technology, chemistry and process engineering, and synthetic biology.

"We think Woodside facilities could eventually recycle methane using technology from String Bio. As landfills and farms have biomethane available, it could also be used there, according to Meg O'Neill, CEO of Woodside Energy.

The only business in Asia that has used biological processes to enable a methane-based value chain is String Bio.

Methane is a greenhouse gas that traps around 27 times the amount of heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and is responsible for a third of global warming. Agriculture and oil and gas According to the AR6 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, industries are the main sources of methane gas emissions.

String Bio has inked a deal with Woodside Energy Technologies Pty Ltd, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Woodside Energy Group, for the production of sustainable protein ingredients from greenhouse gases.

Products enabled by String's platform range from protein ingredients for nutrition, to innovative crop inputs and products for biodegradable polymers. It has its first multi-purpose gas fermentation facility in Bengaluru that can run on methane from both natural gas and biogas.