Industrial Microbes joins the YC Winter 2015 batch: 

The trio of synthetic biologists behind Industrial Microbes, a new East Bay-based startup backed by Y Combinator, have had years of experience in working with biofuels.

They met at LS9, a biofuels startup that took more than $80 million of venture investment through the height of the cleantech wave and sought to create fuels from specially engineered bacteria. From a venture perspective, LS9 was a wash in the end and sold for up to $61.5 million last year.

But Derek Greenfield, Elizabeth Clarke and Noah Helman, who met at LS9 and have PhDs from Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCSF, are trying a new tack with their own company. Industrial Microbes is designing microorganisms that will convert natural gas into industrial chemicals.