CEO Dan Widmaier talks exclusively with Forbes about going public and the ups and downs of running a synthetic biology firm.
olt Threads, a maker of biomaterials including a key ingredient for skincare inspired by spider silk, plans to go public in a SPAC deal that values the one-time unicorn at $250 million.“If the expectation is that things always go up, that’s ludicrous. Things go up, things go down. The real question is, are you building a product that matters to people over time.
Widmaier said that Bolt Threads, which has raised $334 million as a private company from investors that include Founders Fund and Baillie Gifford, had begun looking for SPAC partners earlier this year to provide the capital it needed to grow. While SPACs have been out of favor and many synthetic biology companies have come on hard times, Widmaier has kept the faith in the powers of the technology to solve some of the world’s most difficult environmental problems.
Widmaier studied spider silk during his Ph.D. program in chemistry and chemical biology at UCSF and once kept an office full of giant golden orb weaver spiders spinning webs in hula hoops. But making bio-based spider silk at scale proved difficult, and the Berkeley, California-based company refocused its operations on other biomaterials.
“In my mind this is a pretty beautiful story,” Widmaier said. “You take something that has a massive problem with persistence and replace it with [something] biobased and biodegradable.”
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