Why this beauty start-up just picked up a major defense contract

Debut Biotechnology was founded to “set a new standard in beauty.” Now it may end up shaping how the Pentagon prepares for war.

Since its inception in 2019, the San Diego-based company has presented itself as a disruptor in the cosmetics space. By employing novel methods of biomanufacturing—that is, the use of biological systems to produce commercial products like chemicals or textiles—Debut is able to generate relatively scarce and unique ingredients for everything from perfumes and fragrances to skincare solutions. Rather than hunting for rare resources in the wild, Debut’s biotechnology can grow critical bio-active inputs in a lab faster and more efficiently than naturally occurring processes. 

The company has raised more than $70 million in funding as of its October 2023 $40 million Series B investment from BOLD, the venture capital fund of cosmetics giant L’Oréal. This past July, the two companies signed an agreement in which the Debut would develop more than a dozen bio-identical ingredients to replace conventionally sourced counterparts used across L’Oréal’s products. But it’s another deal, one signed just over a week after announcing its deeper engagement with L’Oreal, that marks a departure from Debut’s focus on the world of beauty. That’s because it’s with the Department of Defense.

The new $2 million contract, announced on July 10, tasks Debut with generating broad plans for the construction of a large-scale “bioindustrial manufacturing production facility” in the United States. The new facility is sanctioned under a new Pentagon initiative designed to bolster domestic supply chains and decrease reliance on foreign sources of critical biomanufactured materials used in everything from fuel to food. Should Debut’s contract prove fruitful, the company may receive a follow-on award worth up to $100 million to actually build such a U.S.-based facility “to onshore foreign production of precursors critical to manufacturing ingredients, materials, resins, polyesters, and thermosetting resins.” 

In short: the U.S. military wants to build its first-ever military-industrial biofactory—and it’s asked Debut to show it how. 

“We are very focused on beauty, which makes up 95 percent of our business,” says Debut founder and CEO Joshua Britton. “But multiple ingredients used in the beauty industry are also used in various military and comercial products. We saw an opportunity to consolidate our process to secure the U.S. supply chain for our customers.”

Biomanufacturing has been a fixture of modern warfare for more than a century. During World War I, when Allied forces faced a major shortage of acetone—a compound essential to the production of the firearm propellant known as cordite—it was chemist (and future Israeli president) Chaim Weizmann who pioneered an industrialized fermentation process allowed Britain to quickly manufacture acetone at scale using maize instead of wood, according to a July entry in National Defense University’s Joint Force Quarterly. Today, U.S. military biomanufacturing efforts are focused on initiatives like developing essential chemical precursors for the production of textiles, plastics, and reflective coatings; vaccines and other medical countermeasures; and high-density fuels and propellants like those used in AGM-114 Hellfire missiles.

In recent years, bolstering the U.S. government’s biomanfucturing capabilities has become an increasingly pressing matter of national security, especially given the vulnerability of critical supply chains. Federal lawmakers have expressed concerns that more than a third of the precursor chemicals the U.S. military relies on for munitions and other “energetic materials”—like those employed to create butanetriol trinitrate, which is used in a number of missile systems—are sourced from China, a dependency that could prove damaging in a future conflict with the country that decision-makers in Washington are convinced will erupt in the next few years.

While Debut has worked for the U.S. military before as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s ReSource program, which focused on converting military waste into useful resources, the new contract is part of a far broader push to secure the country’s bioindustrial infrastructure beyond a handful of labs. Indeed, the Debut contract is one of 30 the Pentagon plans on awarding in hopes of improving the United States’ defense biomanufacturing capabilities, according to the department. The Pentagon plans to spend more than $1 billion in initiatives over the next five years to “catalyze the establishment of a bioindustrial manufacturing base” pursuant to a 2022 executive order from President Joe Biden on the matter and the subsequent Defense Department Biomanufacturing Strategy released in March of last year.

Debut enters the equation when it comes to scaling the U.S. government’s biomanufacturing infrastructure to keep critical production based in American. Whereas existing national biomanufacturing capabilities are small and poorly resourced, Debut has invested heavily in developing and consolidating supply chain resources into an end-to-end process that, according to Britton, allows the company to rapidly develop and deploy multiple ingredients without encountering major structural roadblocks.

“We never wanted to be in the position where we can’t make those billion-dollar ingredients,” Britton says. “We’ve invested in many different types of biomanufacturing so that when you encounter an ingredient, there’s no bottleneck to making it.”

According to Britton, Debut’s biomanufacturing capabilities made the company an easy choice for a Pentagon contract. Not only does the company’s current ecosystem of beauty and cosmetics ingredients include many broadly used in various military and commercial products, but, because of Debut’s deep investment in developing its proprietary biotech infrastructure, the company’s biomanufucturing process “is not specific to one type” of ingredient, meaning it can turn on a dime to generate whatever the Pentagon may require.

Debut’s future biofactory, which Britton suggests will take three to five years to complete following the company’s receipt of a follow-on contract, “will be incredibly flexible, a good investment for the DoD as science and products change very quickly and the ability of a site to quickly change product lines to help out when needed is crucial,” he says.

Moving from beauty disruptor to defense biotech contractor may seem like a significant pivot for Debut, but Britton suggests that the majority of the company’s focus will remain on its beauty business. And while the Pentagon contract is in its early stages and it’s unclear exactly what specific products the future biofactory might produce, Britton affirmed that, despite Debut’s potential to play a major role in securing the country’s defense biomanfuacturing base, the company would never produce materials used in weapons of war, like precursors to explosives, for example.

“People look at the term ‘defense’ with a negative connotation,” Britton says. “The way we look at defense is the security of supply chains.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91170529/why-this-beauty-start-up-just-picked-up-a-major-defense-contract?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss