Stevan Albers, left, and Scott Fulbright are the cofounders of Living Ink Technologies in Berthoud. The company is one of 20 competitors for the Grow-NY Food and AgTech Startup Competition in Canandaigua, NY, in mid-November. (Courtesy photo)
By Shelley Widhalm
The Surveyor
Living Ink Technologies in Berthoud wants to produce black printing ink not only from algae waste but also from spent materials from things like beer and wine.
The international company is pitching what it calls its waste-to-value technology Nov. 12-13 at the Grow-NY Food and AgTech Startup Competition in Canandaigua, NY. The company will be competing for up to $1 million of a total $3 million in prize money against startups from around the world that aim to transform the food and agriculture industries.
“Scott Fulbright, our CEO and co-founder, will be sharing details about how our waste-to-value technology can be a value-add for agricultural producers in the New York region,” said Devon Murrie, director of partnerships and growth for Living Ink, 601 First St. “We are already proving that our technology works with multiple biomass feedstocks beyond algae. So, $1 million and introductions to partners in the region will allow us to build on this success and partner with industrial agriculture groups to help them manage their bio-based waste streams in a more economical and sustainable way.”
Living Ink is one of 20 finalists in the Grow-NY competition that aims to support economic growth and job creation in a spirit of sustainability and entrepreneurship. Seven companies, who work in anything from high-tech solutions on the farm to food safety, will receive financial awards of a $1 million top prize, two $500,000 and four $250,000 prizes. They will then use the awards to grow jobs, partnerships and operations in a 22-county region in New York.
The competition is funded through New York State’s Upstate Revitalization Initiatives—Finger Lakes Forward, CNY Rising and Southern Tier Soaring—and Empire State Development’s Division of Science, Technology and Innovation (NYSTAR).
Living Ink’s cofounders, Scott Fulbright, CEO, and Stevan Albers, CTO, who both hold doctorates in molecular biology from Colorado State University, got the idea for their company in 2013 when they were studying algae for biofuels. Fulbright needed a greeting card for his grandmother and questioned the printing inks being made out of petroleum, noting how carbon black was increasingly becoming unpopular with consumers and facing more and more governmental regulations.
“It’s black pigment that’s produced from fossil fuels that come from the burning of oils and tars,” Murrie said. “There are large carbon emissions and toxic chemicals that are involved in the process.”
Fulbright and Albers realized the algae they’d been studying could replace petroleum with something more environmentally friendly. They initially grew algae and used the discarded algae cells to produce the CMYK color scale for printing inks, pivoting to black ink for its industry pervasiveness. They commercialized in 2017 and have since grown their staff to 10 full-time employees.
“They realized how much carbon black there is across all industries, so they pivoted to waste streams, taking waste algae instead of growing their own algae to produce a myriad of colors,” Murrie said.
Fulbright and Albers initially extracted different colors from their own lab algae, but when they converted to black ink, they intercepted algae waste feedstock that normally had to be discarded. They trademarked the ink as Algae Black, which comes in a black powder pigment and a liquid pigment concentration form.
“We now have a carbon-negative, algae-based pigment,” Murrie said. “We take that waste material, which undergoes a heat treatment to make biochar. And then we refine those pigment particles, and that’s what makes our black pigment and our black ink.”
To get its material, Living Ink is working with a southern California company that grows spirulina algae for its nutritional supplements, offloading the waste in a sustainable way, instead of sending it to a landfill. Living Ink is considering making pigments from biomass feedstocks from breweries, or the spent yeast and grain from the brewing process, as well as biomass waste from wineries and byproducts from yogurt and dairy production, such as acid whey.
“It gives us the agility to expand to other agriculture inputs,” Murrie said. “We’re helping a lot of agricultural manufacturers to manage their waste sustainably and replace petrochemicals in the materials we use and wear with safer alternatives.”
Living Ink is in the works of integrating more steps in its production process, adding research and development capabilities and conducting more testing with biomass input. The company raised $3.5 million to build an onsite pyrolysis plant processor in the first half of 2026 to test various materials and to cut the production costs of Algae Black.
Algae Black has lots of uses that include pigment dye, cosmetics, dyed fibers, paints and coating, plastics, denim coating and leather tanning. It can be used on tape and tissue, polybags, corrugated boxes, paper mailers, hang tabs, rotary and flat red screens, and footwear.
“We’re helping brands to decarbonize their color with our renewable algae-based materials,” Murrie said.
Living Ink can ship orders from 0.5 to 200 kilograms and serve as a project manager for customers. The company can work with its existing partners in the manufacturing supply chain and ship the product directly to them or recommend a number of suppliers that already use its product.
Being part of Grow-NY is a way for Living Ink Technologies to grow its customer base even further.
“It will allow us to scale and expand to new partnerships with groups wishing to transition away from petroleum-based color materials in their supply chains across packaging, apparel, paints, coatings, etc.,” Murrie said. “It will definitely allow our company to expand its operations and continue to scale.”