Written by Kainoa Sastra and Michael Luciani; edited by Jennifer Kan, PhD
DARPA has funded biotech for defense since the 1990s, but recent years have brought a wider awakening in Congress: biotech IS national security, and that recognition is now common currency in Washington. When most people hear biotech for national security, they think about detecting pathogens. This is, of course, very important, but the focus in Washington has moved beyond human health to using biotechnology to stabilize and secure domestic supply chains for commodities and complex biological compounds.
Earlier this month, Juniper GP Michael Luciani spoke at NDIA‘s Emerging Technologies for Defense conference in Washington D.C., on a panel about public-private partnership in biomanufacturing. Around the table: the Pentagon’s Biomanufacturing critical technology area and Office of Strategic Capital, DIU, In-Q-Tel, BioMADE, the NSCEB, other investors, and companies including CycloKinetics, iMicrobes, Lockheed Martin, and Manus, moderated by the Engineering Biology Research Consortium. The piece below comes from both insights from that event as well as research that our venture fellow Kainoa Sastra has been leading internally.
The signal is in the enactment rate
In 2021, Congress created the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) to assess biotechnology’s national-security implications and recommend how the country should respond. Its April 2025 final report offered 49 recommendations across six pillars, serving as a biotechnology action plan for American security and prosperity.
Fourteen months after the report landed, 26 provisions reflecting its recommendations had been signed into law, 36 of the 49 recommendations had drawn bipartisan action in at least one chamber, and more are moving through FY2027 appropriations and defense authorization, according to the Commission’s recommendation tracker. For the United States Congress, that is shockingly fast.
The clearest market signal is the BIOSECURE Act, signed into law on December 18, 2025 as part of the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act. This is a federal procurement exclusion: agencies cannot buy covered biotechnology equipment or services from a designated company of concern, cannot contract with a company that uses one to perform federal work, and cannot let grant or loan dollars reach one. In a 2024 BIO survey of 124 biopharma companies, 79% of respondents reported at least one contract or product supported by a Chinese CDMO, and the Pentagon added WuXi AppTec to the 1260H list in June 2026. The implications are structural and because requalifying a manufacturing partner takes years, not quarters, the shift is happening now.
The bioindustrial implications are just as real. Federal support is embedded in the sector’s path from laboratory research to commercial scale. BioMADE, a Bioindustrial Manufacturing Innovation Institute sponsored by the Department of War (DoW) with more than 300 members, funds industry projects and shared pilot and demonstration facilities, while the Department of Energy operates national laboratory capabilities for process development and scale-up. Companies accessing those capabilities through federal awards or contracts can face supplier restrictions even when their products are industrial chemicals, materials, fuels, or food ingredients.
The Pentagon as both funder and customer
The Pentagon has supported biological research for decades through the Army, The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and other agencies. What is new is the DoW’s expansion of biotechnology into a coordinated supply-chain and procurement strategy. In three years, the department established a Biotechnology Management Office reporting to the Deputy Secretary, raised BioMADE’s federal funding ceiling from $87.5 million to more than $500 million, and included 17 biotechnology provisions in the FY2026 NDAA implementing multiple NSCEB recommendations. Biotech is being legislated as a defense-industrial-base priority.
That matters because the Pentagon is becoming one of biotech’s most consequential customers. It procures at scale, signs long contracts, tolerates capital intensity, and treats supply-chain resilience as a requirement rather than a margin question.
For founders, this represents a new customer profile. Defense applications can provide an initial market alongside commercial customers. Onshore manufacturing becomes a feature rather than a cost penalty. Process resilience becomes a procurement requirement. Technologies that once looked too capital-intensive or too early for venture financing can now pair private investment with a credible, strategic buyer and capital provider.
The carrot is being built
BIOSECURE is the stick, but the carrot is also quietly taking shape.
The proposed Biomanufacturing Excellence Act of 2025 directs the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology to establish a National Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing Center of Excellence through competitive grants and public-private partnerships. The center is designed to demonstrate flexible manufacturing, advance bioprocessing, and underwrite workforce training. The logic is straightforward: the United States cannot decouple from foreign biomanufacturing without building the domestic capacity to replace it.
A coordination layer is emerging around that physical capacity. BioMADE and BEAM Circular combine federal and state funding with research, workforce development, and shared manufacturing infrastructure. Together, these organizations translate public capital into regional capacity and private-sector demand.
With federal and state co-investment, BioMADE is developing pilot and demonstration-scale facilities in Minnesota, Iowa, and California. FY2027 House appropriations also call on the DOE to improve and equip bioindustrial scale-up user facilities and strengthen commercialization partnerships. The market has historically treated physical infrastructure as a capital expense. The current policy stack increasingly treats it as an enabling technology and is moving capital accordingly.
Investors are underpricing the shift
The conventional read on biotech policy is that it moves slowly, is captured by healthcare interests, and cannot support an investment thesis. That read was accurate for much of the last three decades. It no longer is.
26 provisions signed into law, and 36 of 49 recommendations drawing bipartisan action. A new DoW office at the Deputy Secretary level. A roughly sixfold increase in BioMADE’s funding ceiling. That is what a category being institutionalized looks like. The asymmetry now sits between investors positioning for a DoW-anchored bioindustrial buildout and investors still pricing biotechnology exclusively as a healthcare or climate story.
The companies best positioned to benefit are not necessarily building the next therapeutic. They are building the foundation of our economy: fermentation platforms, domestic feedstock conversion, and manufacturing that can clear federal procurement. At Juniper, that profile includes Biosphere, which is redesigning bioreactors to reduce the capital intensity of biomanufacturing; Erg Bio, which converts domestic waste biomass into fuels and chemicals; and Alta Resource Technologies, which uses proteins to separate critical minerals.
These businesses have industrial unit economics, federal customers, and capital profiles that were unfamiliar to venture investors. The policy environment is now rewarding exactly that profile.
The first capital sets the category
Policy windows like this do not stay open indefinitely. The first wave of capital deployed into a newly institutionalized category helps determine which companies become category-defining, which regions concentrate capacity, and which technical standards become defaults. The semiconductor, energy-transition, and rare-earths playbooks all rhyme on this point.
The map most investors are still using was drawn in the last cycle, when biotech meant therapeutics and policy meant delay. It no longer describes the terrain. The buyer is real, the framework is law, and the capacity is under construction.
What remains unsettled is who funds the companies that will fill it. Juniper is betting on biotech for national security: the platforms, the molecules, and the manufacturing that can clear federal procurement. If that is what you are building, we want to hear from you.
Community Updates
The Community updates are back after a summer break and the community did not slow down. Since our last update, we’ve received 36 new deals referred by 18 Scouts. Shout out to Erin Huiting who has referred 8 companies to us this summer, and to Nestor Sampedro and Janina Motter who sent us 4 referrals each in the last couple of months.
Big thanks also to Stephen Sameroff, Kurtis Stadnicki, Jiaming Qi, Sapyr Sebaoun, Omar Matar, Aravinda Seshadri, Georgia Liu, Leela Ghimire, Alice Yu, Aishwarya Kothari, Mike Valliere, Savindu Karunaratne, Sarah Anto, Robert Vava, and Carl Ebeling for all the great founders you sent our way.
We appreciate the overall community and everyone who jumped in and introduced themselves in our Whatsapp group. If you haven’t yet, please join in and drop a note, we love seeing everybody.
Juniper will be at the following events in the coming months. We would love to see you in person soon if you’ll be in any of these cities while we’re there!
Climate Week - Sept 23rd | New York
SuperReturn - Sept 30 to October 1 | Singapore
RAISE Global Summit - Oct 22 | San Francisco