UCLA PhD student raises $1.6 million for algae start-up

In California, UCLA MAE Ph.D. student Wei Yu raised $1.6 million series A venture capital for Lyxia Corporation, a biofuel startup based on research from UCLA MAE Professor Chih-Ming Ho’s Micro System Laboratories. Preceeding this, in July 2012, Lyxia Corporation was founded by Wei, and acquired exclusive rights to use new UCLA technology that increases the harvest of microalgae-derived biofuels.

While the current sugar-based microalgae biofuel industry is striving against the spread between sugars and fuels, researchers and scientists are exploring an efficient, natural way of directly converting carbon dioxide into fuels via microalgae. One possible candidate to this question in a commercial scale deployment could be Botryococcus Braunii, a green, pyramid shaped planktonic microalga, which lives in freshwater, but can also adapt to large range of (sea) salt concentration.