EIC Accelerator, Ginkgo, Lesaffre: Altar's Microbe Evolution Lab

Altar, a start-up on the Genopole biotech campus in Évry south of Paris, built automated culture machines that keep microbes growing for months under rising stress, so that natural selection produces strains able to survive the conditions of industrial fermentation. In May 2020 the European Commission selected it in the Green Deal round of the EIC Accelerator pilot with blended finance, and CORDIS records an EU grant of €2,022,825 for IDEAS, a two-year project to industrialise and digitalise the platform and sell it worldwide. The project never reached its end date. On 3 October 2022, the day CORDIS gives as its termination date, the US synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks bought all of Altar's shares for a total consideration of $12.0 million, according to Ginkgo's annual report for 2023.

Two years later Ginkgo sold Altar again. Its annual report for 2024 says it sold the equity "for a nominal amount" on 30 September 2024 and booked a $7.0 million loss. The buyer was Lesaffre, the French yeast and fermentation group, which took over 14 employees and the machines, according to its announcement. In 2025 Lesaffre merged Altar into its subsidiary Lesaffre International, and the company was struck off the register.

Where Altar Stands Now

Altar no longer exists as a company. On 18 February 2025 Lesaffre International and Altar signed a merger plan under which Lesaffre International, Altar's sole shareholder, absorbed it with accounting effect from 1 January 2025, according to the notice in the BODACC, France's official register of company announcements. The notice valued Altar's assets at €1,172,346 and its liabilities at €1,272,336 on 31 December 2024, so the company was merged with negative net assets of €99,990. The BODACC published its removal from the trade register on 17 April 2025, and the French company directory lists it as closed from 1 April 2025, with Compagnie des Levures Lesaffre as its last president.

The technology lives on inside Lesaffre. The group said Altar's team, know-how and machines would join the Lesaffre Institute of Science and Technology, its research arm, so that it could offer customers more complex strains, according to the trade site Feed and Additive, which also reported that Ginkgo kept access to the technology. What Lesaffre has done with the machines since then has not been published. Altar's website, altar.bio, no longer resolves.

The Technology: Letting Microbes Evolve on a Schedule

Industrial biotechnology uses yeasts, bacteria and microalgae to make food ingredients, chemicals, fuels and cosmetics. Most strain development edits genes directly. Altar did the opposite: its machines grew microbial populations continuously, 24 hours a day, while slowly raising the pressure, for example a toxic compound, a higher temperature or an industrial feedstock, so that mutants better suited to the task would take over. The method is called adaptive laboratory evolution. Altar's archived website stressed two selling points: the strains stay non-genetically modified, which matters where GMOs are banned by regulation or rejected by consumers, and its fluidic system removed the biofilms that build up in long continuous cultures and let some cells escape the selection.

The approach is older than the company. When Altar was registered in 2017, its first president was Heurisko Gesellschaft für Biologische Technologien mbH, according to the BODACC record. Heurisko culture automata of the same kind, run for more than six months without biofilm, are described by the French research centre Toulouse White Biotechnology. Ginkgo's 2022 acquisition release says Altar's technology was developed with the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); no second source for that link was found.

What IDEAS Promised, and What the Record Shows

The Commission's list of selected companies for the 19 May 2020 Green Deal cut-off names Altar alone for IDEAS, with blended finance; no partner company is listed for the project. The grant agreement was signed on 4 December 2020, and the project ran from 1 January 2021 with a total cost of €2,889,750. In its application Altar described a team of eight and said it had gathered 19 letters of interest.

The only report on the CORDIS reporting page sets out two work packages: an industrial version of Altar's Genemat machine (GM4), and a digital platform to run experiments, supervise projects and analyse data. It describes the first year: a manufacturing partner chosen by tender, breadboards built to test each key function for up to three months, a prototype designed, a product manager hired, and a project dashboard whose architecture and interface were "completed" by the end of 2021. It also lists what was still to come: new hardware "designed for industrial production" with safety certification for manufacture outside the EU, a customer-facing online platform, and patents and publications. CORDIS records that the project was terminated on 3 October 2022, 21 months into its 24, and no final report is published.

1. Industrial GM4 hardware with safety certificationNot achievedBreadboards and a prototype design reported for year one; no finished, certified machine announced by Altar, Ginkgo or Lesaffre.
2. Digital platform and customer dashboardsPartlyInternal dashboard architecture and interface completed by end of 2021; the customer-facing platform was never announced.
3. Commercialise the platform worldwidePartlyGinkgo says a fleet of the instruments was integrated into its Foundry to serve customers; since 2024 they serve Lesaffre's own research.
4. Patents and publications from the projectNot achievedNone listed on CORDIS and none found for Altar.
5. Complete the two-year projectNot achievedTerminated on 3 October 2022, the day of the Ginkgo acquisition.

The early end is the main fact of this project. Why it was terminated, and how much of the €2,022,825 was paid out or recovered, CORDIS does not say. Whether the equity part of the blended award was ever invested also cannot be verified: Altar does not appear among the 319 organisations on the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, and Ginkgo's filings, which describe the purchase of all outstanding shares, do not name the sellers.

The Deals

Ginkgo announced the purchase on 4 October 2022 as a "tuck-in acquisition", saying the two companies had already worked together on customer programmes, and quoted Altar's chief executive Simon Trancart welcoming the move to the Ginkgo platform. BioSpace quoted Anna Marie Wagner, Ginkgo's senior vice president of corporate development, calling the technology an "obvious fit" that added an evolution pipeline to Ginkgo's gene editing. The terms were not disclosed at the time. Ginkgo's later filings show a $12.0 million consideration, paid mostly in Ginkgo shares, against which it recognised $8.4 million of intangible assets for Altar's technology and $4.7 million of goodwill, plus $2.3 million of deal costs.

By 2024 Ginkgo was cutting costs. Its 2024 annual report lists the sale of Altar in the third quarter among restructuring measures that included combining laboratories and a reduction in force. The sale "for a nominal amount" produced a $7.0 million loss on deconsolidation. Lesaffre announced the deal on 7 October 2024, saying it had closed at the end of September; the group reports about €3 billion in turnover and about 11,000 employees. For 2023, Altar's last full year under Ginkgo, the French company directory shows revenue of zero and a net profit of €491,709; the filings that would explain the profit are confidential.

The EU Money

IDEAS was Altar's largest public grant, but not its only one. CORDIS lists the €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 project BREEDER in 2019, which Altar's website said was used to prototype the next Genemat machine, and two Horizon 2020 research consortia in which Altar was a partner: eForFuel, on making fuels from electrochemically produced formate, with €489,596.88 for Altar, and SinFonia, on bringing fluorine into bacterial metabolism, with €302,560. Together the four projects committed up to €2.86 million to the company.

Every set of Altar's accounts listed in the BODACC, for 2017 to 2020, 2022 and 2023, was filed with a confidentiality declaration, so its revenue and losses before the Ginkgo sale are not public. Its share capital rose from €10,000 at registration to €195,000 in September 2020 and to €259,439 in December 2022. No outside funding round was announced.

Why Europe Should Care

On 20 March 2024 the Commission set out actions to boost biotechnology and biomanufacturing in the EU, calling it "one of the most promising technological areas of this century" and listing technology transfer to the market, access to finance and economic security among the sector's problems. Strain development is a choke point in that chain: Altar's IDEAS report argues that microbe performance drives the economics of fermentation, and that gene editing cannot be used where GMOs are "banned by either regulation or end consumers", which is the gap non-GM evolution fills.

Altar's path shows both sides. A European tool backed by EU grants was bought by a US company within two years of its EIC award, and the EU project stopped at the sale. It then came back to a French owner, Lesaffre, but as an internal research tool rather than an independent European supplier of the service.

The Verdict

Altar's former managers, Lesaffre, Ginkgo and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.