Amyris

Phase A — Understand the business

Lens 1 · Company Overview

Amyris, Inc. was founded in 2003 as a UC Berkeley spin-out (the synthetic-biology lab of Jay Keasling), originally to produce artemisinin (an anti-malarial) and then renewable biofuels (farnesene) via engineered yeast. After the biofuels economics failed, John Melo (CEO from 2006/2007) pivoted the company twice: first to B2B specialty ingredients (selling fermentation-derived molecules to flavor/fragrance, cosmetics and pharma majors), then ~2017–2021 into owned B2C consumer beauty brands built around its hero molecule squalane (a sugarcane-fermentation replica of shark-liver/olive squalene).

The model at its peak (2021–2022) was a "dual" / vertically-integrated synbio play:

• Lab-to-Market platform — engineer yeast strains → ferment sugarcane feedstock (Barra Bonita, Brazil plant) → high-purity specialty molecules.
• B2B ingredients ("Technology Access" + ingredients) — sell molecules + license platform access to partners. Squalane sold into Shiseido, L'Oréal, AmorePacific; the molecule appears in The Ordinary, JLo Beauty, Peter Thomas Roth.
• B2C "Clean Beauty" brands — ~7 owned DTC/retail brands: Biossance (squalane skincare, the flagship), JVN (hair), Rose Inc., Pipette (baby), MenoLabs, Stripes, 4U by Tia.

Why the dual model — and why it broke: the thesis was that owned brands would "pull" demand for the ingredient and prove its value, feeding more B2B ingredient sales. In practice the consumer build was a cash incinerator (marketing/celebrity spend with negative contribution), and it diluted focus from the one thing that could have mattered (cost-competitive fermentation). The 2023 Chapter 11 reversed the entire strategy: all 7 brands were sold and the company shrank back to B2B-only ("Amyris 2.0").

Today's business (mid-2026): a private, Foris-Ventures-controlled B2B precision-fermentation ingredients company headquartered around Emeryville CA with its production base at Barra Bonita, Brazil; it sells "renewable specialty molecules used across flavours and fragrances, beauty and personal care, food and beverage, agriculture, health, and advanced materials." It is not yet profitable two years post-emergence.

Lens 2 · Supply Chain

Map upstream → company → end customer, with named stakeholders:

• Upstream feedstock: Brazilian sugarcane (sucrose) — the carbon source for fermentation. Co-location at Barra Bonita (São Paulo state) puts the plant next to cane supply. Single-geography feedstock dependence (Brazil cane → exposed to crop/FX/logistics).
• Core conversion (the company): engineered yeast strains (the IP) ferment sugar → farnesene / squalane / and a library of specialty molecules; downstream chemical finishing/purification. Manufacturing chokepoint = fermentation tank capacity + yield; Barra Bonita runs three 2×200 m³ lines with a 2×80 m³ line added in 2024.
• Contract manufacturing history: unlike Zymergen (which outsourced all production and got burned), Amyris owned plants — a genuine differentiator in principle, but owning capital-intensive fermentation assets is exactly what bled cash.
• Downstream B2B buyers (named): DSM-Firmenich (now dsm-firmenich AG — acquired Amyris's F&F intermediates business in 2021 and is a platform partner), Givaudan (consenting stakeholder in the bankruptcy; F&F buyer), Shiseido, L'Oréal, AmorePacific (squalane).
• Former downstream (now severed): the 7 owned consumer brands → Sephora/Ulta/DTC retail. Sold off in Ch.11.

Chokepoints / single-source risks: (1) Barra Bonita is effectively the company — one plant, one country; (2) fermentation yield/cost is the binding constraint on whether any molecule clears margin vs. petrochemical/animal-derived incumbents; (3) post-bankruptcy, Foris is the single source of capital — there is no public market backstop anymore.

Lens 3 · Competitive Advantages (moats)

Claimed moat: a 20-year strain/genomic library, >1,200 patents and pending applications covering engineered strains/processes, and — unusually for synbio — owned manufacturing (vs. design-only peers). The pitch is "design + scale under one roof, faster lab-to-commercial-volume than a pure DNA-design shop."

Honest assessment — the moat is weak where it counts:

• IP volume ≠ pricing power. 1,200 patents did not stop the company from spending ~$1.29 to make $1 of product revenue (2019). A moat that can't produce positive unit contribution is a moat around a money pit.
• The real constraint is thermodynamics + economics, not IP. Fermentation has to beat entrenched chemistry/agriculture on cost at scale; "biological systems exhibit nonlinear behaviours as volume increases," so processes don't scale predictably like chemical reactors. This is an industry-structural disadvantage, not an Amyris-specific one.
• Switching costs are real but narrow. Once squalane is designed into a formulation, it's sticky — but the molecule is a commodity-ish input with alternative suppliers (olive-derived squalane, other synbio routes), so bargaining power over big buyers (L'Oréal, Shiseido) is low: the buyer is bigger and has options.
• Owned plants = double-edged. It's a differentiator vs. Zymergen and the capital sink that, combined with the consumer-brand burn, forced Chapter 11.

Net: the durable asset is a deep strain library + Brazil plant + scarce scale-up know-how. That has option value to a strategic acquirer (DSM-Firmenich, Givaudan, a Cargill/ADM-type) — but as a standalone it has not demonstrated a moat that converts to profit. Tellingly, in the bankruptcy auction the Lab-to-Market platform drew no qualifying bid above its $255.8M reserve price — the market's revealed valuation of the "moat" was below that number.

Lens 4 · Segments

No segments.csv rows on disk — all figures ``. Pre-bankruptcy Amyris reported roughly three revenue buckets: Consumer (owned brands), Ingredients/Renewable products, and Technology Access / Licensing & royalty/grants.

• FY2021 total revenue ≈ $341.8M; FY2022 ≈ $269.8M "core" (Consumer + Technology Access), down ~21% YoY on the comparable basis (companiesmarketcap shows GAAP total revenue ~$0.34B 2021 → ~$0.26B 2022).
• FY2022 Consumer revenue ≈ $176.9M, +92% YoY — management's headline "growth" story.
• The damning context: that 92% consumer "growth" was bought with enormous marketing/operating losses — GAAP net loss ~$378.7M in the first 9 months of 2022 alone (vs. ~$308.0M for 9M 2021). Revenue growth and loss growth moved together.

Trend & cause: the segment mix tells the whole story — the company grew the segment that lost the most money (Consumer) while the higher-quality Technology Access/royalty line (the one that triggered the 2018 SEC issue) was lumpy and partly divested to DSM in 2021. Post-emergence, segments collapse to a single B2B ingredients line; the consumer segment no longer exists.

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Phase B — Measure performance (operating-battery lenses, web-only; pipeline overlay added at Lens 5/7/11)

Lens 5 · Earnings Result — +clinical re-point: Molecule / R&D "pipeline" + last-reported actuals

There is no current earnings print — Amyris is private and does not report. The last meaningful public financials were the FY2022 results (reported March 2023) and stub 2023/2024 bankruptcy MORs (Monthly Operating Reports) on EDGAR. Key last-known actuals ``:

• FY2022 revenue ~$260–270M; FY2021 ~$340M (declining).
• Never profitable in ~20 years; accumulated deficit ~$1.67B as of 2019, and it kept growing (9M-2022 net loss ~$379M).
• Spending ~$1.29 to generate $1 of product revenue (2019) — the canonical statistic of the failure.

Molecule/strain "pipeline" (the +clinical analog — what could create future value):

Balance-sheet flags (historical): chronic going-concern doubt — KPMG flagged substantial-doubt language as early as the April 17, 2018 audit opinion; the company survived on a continuous drip of related-party debt and equity (much of it from Foris Ventures / John Doerr) until that bridge finally broke in 2023.

Market reaction (terminal): equity went to zero in Chapter 11 — the plan cancelled all prepetition common stock and handed 100% of reorganized equity to Foris secured lenders. Old AMRS shareholders were wiped out.

Lens 6 · Earnings Calls / management commentary (sentiment trend)

No transcripts/ on disk; no public calls post-2023 (private). Sentiment reconstructed ``:

• 2018–2021 (Melo era): relentlessly promotional — "best-selling ingredient," recurring talk of imminent profitability and "Technology Access" royalty inflection, while substantial-doubt/going-concern language sat in the filings. The gap between tone and balance sheet is the tell. The SEC found executives withheld information from their own accounting staff to flatter royalty revenue — i.e., the promotional posture extended into the numbers.
• 2023 (collapse): tone flips to "strategic transformation / operational and financial restructuring" — euphemism for "we're filing Chapter 11 and selling the brands."
• 2024–2026 (Fortmann era): markedly different register — sober, cost-discipline language: "drastically different company," burn rate now "a fraction of what it was" / "all of 2025's burn was what it used to be in a month," "a year ahead of plan on top and bottom line," "the most efficient and productive biotech." Notably refuses to share specific financial numbers (private). The new tone is more credible because it's deflationary — but it's also unverifiable.

Phrases dropped: the old "disruptive platform / unbounded upside" framing is gone; replaced by "efficiency, productivity, cash discipline, B2B focus."

Lens 7 · Comps — +clinical re-point: synbio peer set (by business model, not P/E)

Amyris has no public equity (delisted) — there is no market cap, P/E or EV/Sales to quote for it. The relevant comp is the synthetic-biology cohort, whose collective fate is the single most important comp data point: the synbio bust.

EV/Sales, EV/EBIT, P/E, ROE for Amyris: n/a (no public equity). The comp's lesson is qualitative and brutal: >$4B of stranded assets across synbio scale-up failures 2022–2025; the only consistently profitable adjacencies are enzymes (Novozymes/Novonesis) and diversified strategics (DSM-Firmenich) — not pure-play molecule fermenters.

Lens 8 · Stock-Price Catalysts (historical, AMRS pre-delisting)

The chart is a museum of how the market reacted — all ``, mostly directional/qualitative:

• 2010 IPO (~$16/sh) as a biofuels story → multi-year decline as fuels economics failed.
• 2018: the overstated-royalty quarters; when the revenue-recognition problems and internal-control failures surfaced (→ 2021 SEC order), the stock and credibility took lasting damage; securities class action certified for the 3/15/2018–3/19/2019 class period.
• 2020–2021 (COVID synbio/ESG mania): sharp rallies on "clean beauty + sustainability + Reese-Witherspoon-backed Biossance" hype; squalane-for-vaccine-adjuvant headlines. The market reacted to narrative + celebrity, not cash flow.
• 2022–2023: steady collapse on each going-concern reminder, dilutive financing, and the brand sell-off; delisting around the August 2023 Chapter 11 filing. Equity → $0.

Pattern revealed: AMRS traded on story and liquidity events (financings, partner deals, celebrity brand news), almost never on durable earnings — because there were none. The market reacted most violently to dilution and solvency signals. The terminal catalyst was insolvency.

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Phase C — Judge people & books

Lens 9 · Management

Old regime (the value-destroyers):

• John Melo (CEO ~2006/07–2023): ex-BP executive; ran Amyris for ~16 years through three strategy pivots and never reached profitability, presiding over a ~$1.67B+ accumulated deficit and a continuous-dilution capital structure. Named (with the former CFO) in the certified securities class action. Archetype: promotional professional-manager who repeatedly sold a turnaround that never arrived. Major red flag.
• Kathleen Valiasek (former CFO): co-defendant in the securities litigation tied to the 2018 royalty overstatement.
• John Doerr / Kleiner Perkins / Foris Ventures: the long-time anchor backer. Doerr's vehicle Foris funded round after round of rescue debt — and ended up owning the company outright by converting DIP + secured claims into 100% of reorganized equity. Read two ways: (a) deep conviction/commitment to synbio; (b) a backer so deep in that debt-for-control was the only exit — a classic "throwing good money after bad until you own the wreck" pattern. Either way, post-emergence Amyris is effectively Doerr's private company.

New regime (the cleaners):

• Han Kieftenbeld — interim CEO/CFO through the bankruptcy; stabilized and articulated the "most efficient biotech" aspiration.
• Kathy Fortmann — CEO from May 7, 2024. ~35 years in specialty chemicals/ingredients (ex-Cargill, ex-CEO of ACOMO N.V.). A genuine operator/ingredients-industry profile rather than a visionary-founder — exactly the archetype a post-bankruptcy B2B ingredients business needs. Has cut uneconomic projects and slashed burn. Credible, but governing a company with no independent board check (Foris controls the equity).

Capital-allocation history: catastrophic under the old regime — biofuels capex written off, consumer-brand empire built then sold for ~$29.6M (cents on the dollar vs. what was sunk), perpetual dilution, related-party debt. ROE/ROIC were persistently negative; there is no positive capital-allocation track record to point to pre-2024.

Lens 10 · Forensic Red Flags

This is the lens where Amyris is a case study, not a borderline call.

Regulatory findings (required sub-section):

• SEC EDGAR (LR/AAER) auto-search: regulatory/regulatory-findings.md returns 0 SEC findings via the automated EFTS search — but only because Amyris has no current CIK as a filer (impaired/delisted). The automated null is a coverage gap, not an all-clear. The actual enforcement record is material:
• SEC Administrative Proceeding 34-93341 (October 4–5, 2021): the SEC charged Amyris with improper revenue recognition resulting from internal accounting-control failures. Finding: in Q1 and Q2 2018, Amyris improperly recognized royalty revenue from a customer using an Amyris chemical to make Vitamin E; executives received information material to estimating that royalty revenue and failed to share all of it with the accounting staff, producing materially inaccurate financial statements that overstated royalty revenue. Amyris settled (control-failure / reporting charges). This is a confirmed SEC enforcement action — quote it as the central forensic fact.
• Securities class action: certified Dec 8, 2021 in N.D. Cal. against Amyris, CEO John Melo, and former CFO Kathleen Valiasek, class period 3/15/2018–3/19/2019, alleging the company misled investors about internal-control improvements and overstated royalty revenue.
• Going-concern: auditor substantial-doubt language present from 2018 onward — a multi-year flashing red light.

Accounting-risk taxonomy (income statement / balance sheet / cash flow):

• Revenue recognition — the proven weak spot (royalty/Technology-Access revenue is judgment-heavy and was the subject of the SEC action). Lumpy "Technology Access"/grant/upfront revenue chronically flattered headline growth.
• Cash flow vs. earnings divergence — extreme and chronic: GAAP losses were enormous, but the deeper tell was operating cash burn requiring perpetual external financing (~$1.29 spent per $1 of product revenue). Earnings quality was effectively negative throughout.
• Related-party financing — heavy reliance on Foris/Doerr insider debt; related-party leverage is itself a governance red flag (and ultimately the mechanism by which the insider took the whole company).
• Goodwill/intangibles & brand carrying values — the consumer brands were built/acquired at far higher implied values than the ~$29.6M they fetched in the Ch.11 auctions → large value impairments embedded in the collapse.
• Going concern / solvency — the master flag; realized as Chapter 11.

Verdict on the books: Amyris is the forensic red-flag exemplar — confirmed SEC revenue-recognition enforcement, multi-year going-concern, negative cash conversion, related-party control, and a terminal bankruptcy that wiped equity. For the post-emergence private, the books are unaudited-to-the-public and unverifiable; the base rate from this management lineage demands maximum skepticism.

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Phase D — Project & stress-test

Lens 11 · Forward Projection — +private + +clinical re-point: IPO-readiness / path-to-tradeable + runway, NOT an EPS line

No EPS projection is meaningful — Amyris is private, gives no numbers, and there is no security to own. Per the +private overlay, the question that matters is path-to-tradeable, and per +clinical it is runway-to-value-inflection.

• IPO-readiness: LOW / none announced. No S-1 path signaled through 2025; CEO commentary points to stabilizing cash flow first, and the realistic liquidity event is a strategic sale of the fermentation platform (to a DSM-Firmenich / Givaudan / Cargill-type), not a re-IPO.
• Ownership: Foris Ventures owns ~100% of reorganized equity (debt-for-equity conversion + ~$190M exit financing). There is no minority equity for an outside investor to buy in public markets.
• Runway / burn: materially improved — management says 2025's full-year burn ≈ a single month of the old burn, and 2025 came in "a year ahead of plan" on top and bottom line (unquantified, unaudited). If literally true, runway is far better than the old regime — but it is management's word, not a filing.
• Value-inflection catalysts: the two in-house beauty molecules reaching market (2025–26) and proof that the slimmed Barra Bonita operation can run at positive unit contribution — the thing the company never demonstrated in 20 public years.

n/a for FY-forward EPS/revenue (private, no guidance). No Brier forecast logged — per --watchlist rules (skip forecast.ts create), and because there's no scoreable public EPS line anyway. If a forecast were logged it would be a binary: "Amyris files an S-1 or is acquired in a disclosed deal by YE2027" — base rate skewed toward acquisition, not IPO, and toward a modest headline price given the platform drew no qualifying bid >$255.8M in 2023.

Lens 12 · Bull vs Bear

Bull case (steelmanned):

• The asset survived. A 20-year strain library + >1,200 patents + an operating Brazil plant + scarce scale-up know-how are real, hard-to-replicate assets — and they were acquired by the new entity essentially debt-free (~$1.15B of obligations wiped). A clean balance sheet + genuine IP is a far better starting point than the old Amyris ever had.
• Right management, finally. An ingredients-industry operator (Fortmann, ex-Cargill) running a focused B2B model, with burn cut to a fraction, is the configuration that could finally clear positive unit economics.
• Strategic optionality. DSM-Firmenich already owns part of the old F&F business and partners on the platform — a natural acquirer; the platform has clear option value to a consolidator even if standalone returns are thin.
• Secular tailwind: demand for sustainable, animal-free, lower-carbon ingredients (squalane vs. shark; bio-routes vs. petrochemicals) is structurally growing.

Bear case (2–3 permanent-impairment risks):

1. The economics may simply never close. The synbio bust shows fermentation-vs-chemistry cost gaps are an industry-structural problem, not a management one — Zymergen liquidated, Ginkgo cratered, and Amyris already failed once. >$4B stranded across the cohort.
2. No equity to own + total Foris control. Even if Amyris 2.0 works, outside investors capture nothing unless/until Foris chooses a liquidity event on its own terms; a minority would face a controlling-shareholder with all the leverage.
3. Credibility deficit. A confirmed SEC revenue-recognition action, a securities class action, and 20 years of unmet promises mean any future numbers carry a permanent skepticism discount — and the post-emergence figures are unaudited to the public.

Pre-mortem (18 months out, thesis broke): the two in-house molecules underwhelm or get out-competed on price; Barra Bonita still can't hit positive contribution at the slimmed scale; Foris tires of funding and sells the platform to DSM-Firmenich for a low-nine-figures sum — the platform is worth more inside a strategic than standalone, exactly as the 2023 auction (no bid >$255.8M) already implied.

Contrarian view (what the market refuses to see): the contrarian read isn't "Amyris is a buy" — it's that the entire vertically-integrated, owned-brand synbio model is structurally unfinanceable in public markets, and the only viable homes for fermentation IP are (a) profitable enzyme incumbents (Novozymes/Novonesis) and (b) diversified strategics (DSM-Firmenich) — which is precisely where Amyris's best assets are drifting. The lesson is the trade, not the equity.

Lens 13 · Devil's Advocate (short-seller)

(There is nothing to short — no public equity — so this is a "why the survivor story is overrated" teardown.)

• What structurally breaks the model: unit economics. If a molecule can't be fermented below the incumbent's cost at scale, no amount of IP, branding, or "sustainability" fixes it. Amyris already proved this empirically (~$1.29 cost per $1 of revenue).
• Revenue concentration: historically dependent on a handful of large F&F/cosmetics buyers (DSM-Firmenich, Givaudan, L'Oréal, Shiseido) with all the bargaining power — and Amyris sold its best F&F business to DSM in 2021, ceding the highest-quality revenue.
• Most dangerous competitor bulls underestimate: Novozymes/Novonesis (proves enzymes/biomanufacturing can be hugely profitable — at a different layer, making Amyris's value proposition look like the hard part of synbio) and DSM-Firmenich itself (which can simply buy the platform cheaply rather than pay Amyris a premium).
• Worst capital-allocation / governance moves: the consumer-brand empire (built then dumped for ~$29.6M); chronic dilution; related-party Foris debt that converted into 100% ownership — a structure where the controlling insider's incentives and minorities' (former) interests were fundamentally misaligned, capped by the SEC revenue-recognition action.
• What must hold for any "value": that Foris funds to a real liquidity event and shares the upside with anyone other than itself — neither is in an outsider's control.
• If growth disappoints 20–30%: for a still-unprofitable fermenter, a 20–30% revenue miss isn't a valuation haircut — it's a return-to-cash-crisis scenario, mitigated only by Foris's willingness to keep writing checks.
• Single permanent-impairment scenario (plausible): Foris declines further funding before positive cash flow → distressed asset sale of Barra Bonita + IP to a strategic → second wipe-out of any residual standalone value. Plausibility: moderate-to-high given the base rate.

Lens 14 · Management Questions (15, ordered by information value)

1. At what fermentation cost-per-kg does each of your two lead in-house molecules clear positive gross contribution at Barra Bonita's current scale — and are you there today, yes or no?
2. Is reorganized Amyris cash-flow-positive (operating) on a trailing basis, and if not, what is the current monthly burn and months of runway?
3. What is Foris's stated funding commitment going forward, and at what point does it stop funding operating losses?
4. What is the realistic liquidity path for the equity — strategic sale, re-IPO, or none — and on what timeline?
5. Given the platform drew no qualifying bid above $255.8M in 2023, what has materially changed to make it worth more now?
6. Which customers account for the top 50% of current B2B revenue, and how concentrated is that book?
7. What is your relationship and contractual standing with DSM-Firmenich post-2021 sale — partner, competitor, or potential acquirer?
8. How do you defend squalane (and the new molecules) against olive-derived and competing-synbio substitutes on price?
9. What specifically did you stop funding when you "cleaned up the portfolio," and what was the annual burn those projects represented?
10. What are the audited FY2024 and FY2025 revenue and EBITDA figures — will you share them, and if not, why not?
11. How is the board constituted and what independent oversight exists over a 100%-Foris-owned company, post the 2021 SEC control-failure findings?
12. What remediation of the internal-accounting-control deficiencies cited by the SEC is in place today?
13. What is the patent-cliff / LOE timeline on the most commercially important molecules in the 1,200-patent estate?
14. What is the capacity-utilization of Barra Bonita's lines (the three 2×200 m³ + the new 2×80 m³), and what utilization is needed for plant-level profitability?
15. If fermentation economics never beat chemistry for a given molecule, what is Plan B for that program — license, abandon, or subsidize?

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