MicroByre is a platform for bacterial domestication. Their automated characterization pipeline gathers the oft-overlooked data that highlights unleveraged bacteria that meet functional industrial criteria. That is, they rapidly find the bacteria with naturally unfussy eating habits and evolution-honed metabolisms that have the potential to convert unrefined biomasses into commodity chemicals at vastly improved efficiencies compared to extant fermentation processes. They select from these functionally de-risked bacteria those which can be directly genetically modified to improve their cost profiles — even if they have never been engineered before. The data from our unique characterization pipeline informs the minimally precise genetic modifications necessary to increase pliability and yield, eliminate nutritional additives, maximize feedstock utilization, and improve contamination tolerance & phage resistance. MicroByre gives biomass conversion a truly competitive edge against petrochemical synthesis.