Lunch & Learn with Levitree and Equator Therapeutics

By Bella Liu.

On Wednesday, at our first our first Lunch and Learn for 2025, the founders of Levitree and Equator Therapeutics came to present their work and their teams, giving the greater Bakar Bio Labs community a better sense of what they do.

“Our premise is that flood consultants take too long and they’re too expensive,” Levitree COO Laurence Allen said, kicking off the event. A better, more effective and cost-efficient alternative, Allen suggests, would be a “one stop shop for flood resilience” like Levitree.

As opposed to building more costly traditional preventative measures like dikes and seawalls, Levitree wants to inject biomass into the ground beneath at-risk communities to elevate them and ultimately reduce their flooding potential. Using geo-reasoning tools and an iPad-controlled injection robot, Levitree aims to lift whole cities above critical sea levels — and all under a more effective and cost-efficient model than is currently available.

“This is really a paradigm shift for flood prevention,” Allen said. “There’s been, you know, tons of flood damage, you’ve seen it on the news. But it’s just becoming more and more severe. It’s time to finally fix that.”

Jonah Sinick followed up to talk about Equator Therapeutics’ weight loss drug. Unlike other GLP-1s already on the market, which create weight loss by suppressing appetites, Equator’s drug targets fat by increasing mitochondrial activity, burning calories by increasing natural heat production.

“We’re talking about producing an amount of heat quite a bit less than that of walking,” Sinick, Equator’s CEO, said. “If you want a drug that burns fat but preserves muscle, and convenient oral administration as opposed to injection,” then “this has potential to be a really revolutionary breakthrough in making this approach viable.”

Both Levitree and Equator are members of the Community Access Bakar Labs program.

Ultimately, after taking questions from the crowd, discussion moderator Gino Segre concluded that these Lunch and Learns are valuable because they can reveal shared curiosities between companies that may not be immediately obvious, building community through shared fundamental goals.

As for what makes Levitree and Equator similar? “Both of them are moving around biomass,” Segre said, “that’s why we paired them up.”