Berkshire Business Journal Growing a business

Four Monument grads team up to create products from cells

BY JOHN TOWNES

They grew up together in South County and graduated from the same high school before leaving the Berkshires to pursue separate academic goals.

But even though Sam Levin, Loren Amdahl-Culleton, Luc Harrigan and Sean White were scattered across the country and around the world, they still managed to stay connected, seeing each other mostly on holidays spent at home.

Now, these four Monument Mountain Regional High School graduates are together again. They’re the co-founders of a Brooklyn N.Y.-based company that hopes to play a key role in what the four men believe will be a major transformation in the way physical products are manufactured, managed and disposed.

Their venture, Melonfrost, has developed a proprietary platform to help create a new generation of organisms to serve as the basis of fuel, textiles, building materials, therapeutics, packaging, agriculture, food production, and many other items and applications. On Feb. 1, Melonfrost achieved a significant milestone after seven years of planning and preparation when the company received $7 million in venture capital seed funding and took on its first customer.

GROWING, Page 12

Above: Biochemist Sasen Efrem works on Melonfrost’s prototype evolution reactor system. Four graduates of Monument Mountain Regional High School have formed Melonfrost in Brooklyn, N.Y., a company that is involved with applications in synthetic biology. The group includes, from left, Loren AmdahlCulleton, Sam Levin, Sean White and Luc Harrigan.