I was about to pick up my cell phone when I realized I still had rhino horn lotion all over my hands. It wouldn’t come off. The lotion was surprisingly thick and creamy, and when I brought it to my nose it smelled faintly of a musty old couch. Once I finally gathered enough tissues to wipe the lotion off, I realized that my hands were noticeably softer. No rhinos were harmed in the process of softening my hands, however.

I was checking out IndieBio, a new biotech accelerator in San Francisco where early-stage biotech ventures get mentorship, access to lab space, and seed funding. When I visited out the space, IndieBio had been open for just two weeks, but was already buzzing with scientists working on projects that sound like they’re straight out of Silicon Valley’s collective vision of an ideal future. Everything a science-based startup might want is available in the space, from basic biotech lab equipment (centrifuges and lots of machines with three-letter names) to a cell culture area and a designated hardware room.





“We want everyone who comes through to feel more entrepreneurial and start companies, even if they fail,” says Arvind Gupta, co-founder of IndieBio and partner at SOS Ventures. The hope is that IndieBio’s support can allow biotech entrepreneurs to flourish without feeling the need to work inside university or big corporate infrastructures.

When Gupta and his co-founder Ryan Bethencourt–a former senior director of prize development at XPRIZE–talk about the accelerator, they tend to describe it in terms of how it could lead to solutions that provide planetary peace and longer, healthier lives for us all–salvation through science, essentially.

“We don’t want to end up in a class war. We want everyone to have food, clean water, and a long life expectancy,” says Gupta.

Taking a tour of the lab, it’s not hard to get swept up in the promise of the startups within, many of which are working on synthetic biology projects that are only now possible because of advances in the field that have made biotech equipment cheaper and faster than ever before.





The startups in IndieBio are all working on big-picture issues. Pembient, the company that concocted my rhino horn lotion, wants to fight animal poaching by creating synthetic versions of the items that poachers want–starting with rhino horns. In South Africa alone, 1,215 rhinos were poached in 2014, causing the world to lose 4% of the total rhino population. Part of the problem is that rhino horns are used as traditional medicine (for reducing fevers, among other things) in parts of Asia.