Howdy Mycopreneurs,

I’m in the bucolic Colorado mountain resort town of Telluride this week for the 46th Annual Telluride Mushroom Festival, the oldest and biggest mushroom festival in the United States.

This year it stands at an inflection point as the rising costs of its ritzy mountain hamlet host town and associated programming overhead bring the future of this extraordinary event into question. I’m covering it with a media pass and will have more insights into the programming, panels, and mycelial happenings as the party starts to kick off in earnest today through Saturday.

I’m hosting the Mycopreneur Happy Hour at the fabulous Hotel Telluride today at 4 pm Mountain Time — if you’re in town or know someone who is, send them our way! We’ll still host the online Incubator as regularly scheduled today, and you can find the invitation for that at the bottom of this newsletter.

This year the festival is notably having its first ever Mushroom Pet Costume Parade sponsored by Real Mushrooms — the mushroom supplement for pets category is growing significantly and I imagine the visibility of this new addition to the iconic TMF parade will garner some virality online. I mean who doesn’t want to see a bunch fo adorable furr babies in mushroom costumes marching down main street in one of the most beautiful towns in the world?

Mushroom people of all stripes are here in spades, and the mycelial network is alive and well carrying all kinds of insights into what’s happening where around the mushroom space, so stay tuned for some of those in the near future.

A biotech company called LifeMine has received $188 million dollars in their Series E funding round targeting AI drug discovery based on fungi genetics sequencing.

From the press release:

“The platform that attracted Gates and Bezos is based on genes sequenced from 100,000 fungal strains, which LifeMine then organized into clusters based on the biosynthetic pathways involved. Within the next month, Verdine said, the biotech will begin using AI agents to sift through the 1,200 potential drug targets revealed by this process to unearth hidden gems”

This is a strong signal that fungal genomes are becoming a higher-value drug discovery platform; maybe some of this type of biotech funding can find it’s way towards philanthropic support of legacy institutions in the space like the Telluride Mushroom Festival in the coming years?

This isn’t Bezos and Gates’ first foray into backing mushroom innovation — in 2021 they invested in a fungi-based meat alternative. The future is most definitely fungi, but who exactly owns that future is still in question.

More and more companies are leveraging artificial intelligence to automate and optimize mushroom production. Sensors and cameras can continuously monitor environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity and CO₂, while machine-learning tools analyze data to improve growing conditions, predict crop development and identify when mushrooms are ready for harvest. The technology aims to increase yields, reduce labor and energy costs, and make commercial mushroom farming more efficient and scalable. The broader trend reflects the emergence of “smart mushroom farms,” combining traditional cultivation knowledge with automation, data analytics and AI to create more precise, sustainable growing systems.

Scientists identified a mushroom that mysterious sprouted out of an apple in China as Schizophyllum commune, also known as the splitgill mushroom – an edible fungus usually found on decaying wood. They isolated its strain and crossed it with another strain that had traveled into space aboard China's Shenzhou-12 spacecraft.

Be on the lookout for an upcoming Mycopreneur Podcast episode with a NASA scientist and Artemis mission collaborator aiming to deploy fungi innovation to support astronauts and space travel —

Astromycology? I think so!

For August, our partners at Full Canopy Genetics are offering a landrace & hybrid combo for their fungi genetics: Hillbilly & TWxAPE.

Hillbilly is a domestic landrace, discovered growing wild in Arkansas. Tidal Wave & Albino Penis Envy, the union of two legendary varieties. TW is a cross of B+ and Penis Envy. APE is a cross of Penis Envy and PF Albino.

Don’t forget you can subscribe and save $20 + shipping.

I was quoted and Mycopreneur was featured in WIRED this week in an article about ‘outlaw chemist’ Willy Myco — great read and global reach, check it out if you haven’t seen it yet.

I’m down in the Sheridan Opera House in downtown Telluride right now and just came across one of the more interesting myco products I’ve seen to date courtesy of my friend Alex Dorr, who just returned from a remarkable mushroom trip to Yunnan, China:

Psychedelic Bolete (Lanmoa Asiatica) flavored cigarettes. These are the mushrooms that contain as an yet unidentified psychedelic compound that causes many people who consume them raw to report Lilliputian visions of ‘little people’.

Time: Aug 13, 2026 03:00 PM ET U.S. / 1 PM PT
Every week on Thu, 106 occurrence(s)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87575277676?pwd=w5k1GGlfZ22I3SOtolZbZokYnxpUi8.1

And lastly…the debut World Mushroom Forum is set to take place online August 21-23, and is shaping up to be something special — tickets and information are available here, don’t sleep on this!

Thanks for reading the Mycopreneur Newsletter,

Dennis