Genomatica Hires Chief Financial Officer

SAN DIEGO, July 18, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Genomatica announced that it has hired Michael E. Keane as executive vice president and chief financial officer (CFO).  

From 2008 until joining Genomatica, Mike was executive vice president and chief financial officer of Clipper Windpower, Inc., joining the board of directors in 2010.  While enabling a ramp-up of revenue growth from $24 million in 2007 to over $700 million over the next two years, Mike led a team that decreased inventories by over $150 million, increased cash flow in excess of $100 million, and completed the negotiation of the sale of the company at a premium to United Technologies.  

Prior to Clipper, Mike was corporate vice president and chief financial officer of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), a global information technology services company.  At CSC from 2005 to 2008, Mike led a restructuring program to significantly reduce global resourcing costs, and a three-fold expansion of bank line capacity to $2 billion.  Prior to CSC, Mike was senior vice president and chief financial officer at UNOVA, an industrial technologies company, and its predecessor company, Western Atlas Inc., from 1996 to 2005.

Mike holds a bachelor's degree in accounting from Illinois State University and a master's degree in business administration from the Executive MBA program of the Anderson Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles.

"Genomatica has achieved multiple important milestones on our fast path to commercialization," said Genomatica CEO Christophe Schilling.  "This seemed the perfect time to add Mike as our CFO.  Mike brings deep experience across all facets of finance and has proven himself at both large and small companies across a broad range of industries and business models."  

About Genomatica

Genomatica is a leader in sustainable chemicals: 'greener' intermediate and basic chemicals made from renewable feedstocks, rather than oil and gas.  The company aims to transform the chemical industry by making the same high-volume products at the core of the industry but with better economics and a smaller environmental footprint.  Genomatica is a 2011 winner of the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award, was recently named one of '10 Big Green Ideas' by Newsweek and has been featured on Forbes.com.

Genomatica is in demonstration-scale production of its first product, Bio-BDO, through a strategic partnership with Tate & Lyle.  BDO is an intermediate chemical that is an important ingredient in the production of spandex, automotive plastics, running shoes and more.  The company is planning significant commercial production in late 2012, with world-scale plants in the U.S., Europe and Asia starting in 2014.

Genomatica believes its integrated bio-process engineering platform and extensive intellectual property will allow it to rapidly develop organisms and processes to produce dozens of the highest-volume intermediate and basic chemicals from renewable feedstocks, like sugars, and later, from biomass and syngas.  

Genomatica has announced agreements with Tate & Lyle, Mitsubishi Chemical, Gruppo M&G and Waste Management.  

SOURCE Genomatica