"Shiqi Shenghua" Secures Over 100 Million Yuan in Financing, Pilot Plant Operates for Over 10,000 Hours, 50,000-Ton Project Gets Approval | Exclusive Report by 36Kr
36Kr learned that the biomanufacturing enterprise "Shiqi Biochemical" recently completed a financing of over 100 million yuan. The latest investors include Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Intellectual Property Fund and Tianchuang Capital. This round of financing will be mainly used to promote the company's key leap from pilot-scale to industrialization. Previously, the company had received investments from institutions such as Boyuan Capital, Tencent, Qianhai Mother Fund, and Nanchuang Investment.
Shiqi Biochemical was established in January 2023 and focuses on the development of one-carbon bioconversion and gas fermentation technologies. Co-founders Wen Zhiqiang and Wang Qingzhuo were fellow students in the Key Laboratory of Synthetic Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences during their doctoral studies. The research group they belong to has served more than 100 industrial projects and has nearly 20 years of profound accumulation in the R & D field of gas fermentation and one-carbon bioconversion technologies.
At the just-concluded 2026 National Two Sessions, the "Government Work Report" for the first time listed "reducing carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by about 3.8%" as an annual expected target, marking that China's carbon emission management has shifted from a long-term strategy to an annual hard constraint and officially made a precise transformation from "managing energy" to "managing carbon".
Meanwhile, macro variables such as international geopolitical conflicts have also made the risk of import dependence on bulk raw materials more prominent, including petroleum and protein raw materials such as soybean meal and fishmeal. The self - control and sustainability of raw materials in energy and chemical industries have become a strategic necessity for China's industrial security.
In this context, the strategic value of one-carbon bioconversion and gas fermentation technologies is particularly prominent. This technology uses CO, CO₂ emitted by industrial enterprises or gasified gas from waste biomass as raw materials and converts them into chemicals, fuels, or single - cell proteins through synthetic biotechnology.
It is reported that the Shiqi Biochemical team has been researching Clostridium genetic manipulation and gene editing for 20 years. Based on this, the company has developed special strains capable of completing complex metabolic pathways and has the ability to synthesize more than 30 kinds of downstream products such as acids, alcohols, and esters.
Based on the product selection concept of "using high - tech to produce low - value - added bulk products", Shiqi Biochemical has chosen butanol as its first product pipeline and produces alternative feed protein as a by - product. As a standard bulk chemical, the downstream sales of butanol and other products have full price competition, which is a typical case of "the lowest - priced one gets the market share".
The mainstream route for traditional butanol production is the petroleum - propylene process, with raw material costs accounting for more than 60%. Wang Qingzhuo, co - founder of Shiqi Biochemical, once told 36Kr: "The Clostridium gas - consuming fermentation method we adopt uses industrial waste gas as raw material. The proportion of raw material costs is far lower than that of the traditional route, and the processing cost is similar to that of the traditional route. We are reconstructing the cost logic of bulk chemicals with innovative technologies and building a competitive advantage by actively reducing the dimension."
Beyond technological breakthroughs, a major difficulty faced by synthetic biology is engineering scale - up. The Shiqi Biochemical team has a strong engineering gene and has accumulated rich experience in the construction and operation of large - scale chemical plants. Since 2024, the company has successively built pilot - scale plants of 100 - ton and 500 - ton levels for the fermentation of coal chemical tail gas to synthesize ethanol/higher alcohols and single - cell proteins, and achieved flexible production of alcohol - protein at the process level.
As of now, the four pilot - scale plants of Shiqi Biochemical have completed more than 10,000 hours of pilot - scale testing and sample production; the development of a 10,000 - ton - level alcohol - protein flexible production process package has been completed. At the same time, the 50,000 - ton - level demonstration project has been successfully registered and coded, and industrialization is about to be launched.
In terms of business model expansion, in addition to the income from selling bulk raw materials and proteins, the low - carbon attribute of Shiqi Biochemical's new path will also bring additional business increments. It is estimated that compared with petroleum - based butanol, its biomanufacturing technology can reduce about 4 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per ton of butanol produced. In the future, the company plans to enter the CCUST (Carbon Capture, Utilization, Storage, and Transformation) commercial market, deliver carbon emission reduction devices to large - scale coal chemical and power enterprises, and obtain additional benefits through carbon quota and carbon sink trading.