At Stray Dog Capital, we back visionary teams building the infrastructure for a more sustainable, resilient future. Today, we’re thrilled to share our recent investment in Cascade Bio, a company pioneering enzyme immobilization technologies that promise to revolutionize cell-free biomanufacturing. 

Biomanufacturing has long promised to produce essential goods—such as food ingredients, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals—without relying on fossil fuels. However, most of today’s biomanufacturing relies on cell-based fermentation, a method that is slow, capital-intensive, and difficult to scale. Meanwhile, enzymes have been underutilized due to their fragility in real-world industrial environments. Cascade Bio solves this critical bottleneck. 

A Platform for Industrial Enzyme Innovation 

Founded in 2021 by Alex Rosay and Dr. James Weltz, Cascade Bio has developed a novel approach to enzyme stabilization. Their proprietary resin platform, dubbed “Body Armor for Enzymes™,” allows enzymes to be immobilized to preserve their activity and enable reuse under harsh industrial conditions involving heat, solvents, and variable pH. This dramatically improves enzyme performance, economics, and scalability. 

Unlike existing immobilization methods, which are often fragile, expensive, or limited to specific enzyme classes, Cascade’s polymer-brush resin has demonstrated success across 30+ enzyme types. This unlocks broad applicability across industries ranging from food and pharma to carbon capture, plastics recycling, and specialty chemicals. By enabling cell-free biomanufacturing at scale, Cascade Bio is helping to build a faster, cleaner, and more flexible bioeconomy. 

Our Investment Thesis 

We invested in Cascade Bio because we believe they are solving a mission-critical challenge in the bioeconomy: how to make enzyme-based manufacturing robust, scalable, and affordable. Their approach enables a shift from costly fermentation systems toward modular, cell-free platforms that serve food, chemical, and climate industries alike. 

Cascade’s combination of early revenue, strong unit economics, world-class founders, and deep market applicability aligns closely with our thesis of funding transformative companies that reimagine how we produce what we consume. We are proud to join Endurance 28 and others in this round and look forward to supporting the team as they scale their manufacturing and grow their enzyme portfolio. 

Looking Ahead 

With this seed round, Cascade Bio will expand production, hire key technical talent, and commercialize additional proprietary enzymes. The team’s roadmap includes scaling to ton-level production, achieving resin sales of over $2M, and launching high-impact enzymes for carbon capture and cofactor regeneration. 

We believe Cascade Bio is not just building better enzymes, but setting the foundation for a more agile, sustainable, and decentralized biomanufacturing ecosystem.