Synonym is now becoming Roebling. Our team is leveraging everything that Synonym has accomplished in feasibility, techno-economic analysis, process development, and factory engineering to build an entirely new way to plan and develop industrial infrastructure.

Four years ago, Synonym was founded to support a coming infrastructure boom in energy and materials. We thought biomanufacturing would be a key pathway for new materials and Synonym worked to develop the infrastructure needed to get bioproducts to market.

We ended up working with customers from startups to Fortune 500 companies, to the Department of Energy and the Department of War, to deliver productized techno-economic analyses – roadmaps for understanding product economics, building factories, and getting to profitable production at scale. In 2024, the Department of Commerce awarded Synonym and our partner Primient a $16M grant to redevelop a facility at Primient’s Decatur campus – the iPROOF facility will be the most advanced demo-scale biomanufacturing facility in the country when it comes online next year.

We mostly did this work as companies always have: manually, in Excel, spending hundreds of hours on each project. There were no tools to easily bring all of that data and simulation together to get to fast and dynamic answers. 

We also realized the problems of siloed systems and incomplete models go far beyond biomanufacturing. As our industrial base is undergoing a once-in-a-century transformation, we need new ways of thinking about infrastructure planning and development. Methods and patterns that worked in the 20th century are not the roadmap for the 21st. Fundamentally new technologies and processes require not only new infrastructure, but also new tools for analysis and communication for putting steel in the ground. This is the only way to win in the next wave of the manufacturing race. 

Roebling offers a single, connected workspace for the earliest and most error-prone phases of project development: techno-economic analysis, early process design, and cost estimation. Current computational approaches allow us to be more agile across the board – and with that in mind, we built Roebling as an engine to power industrial decision-making and development across process-heavy industries, including biomanufacturing, food and agriculture, critical minerals, chemicals, and energy. 

Roebling replaces siloed and fragmentated workflows with an integrated, AI-native environment that lets project owners, engineers, and financial analysts model, refine, and validate project concepts in hours and days instead of months. For anyone who thinks about project or product feasibility, from entrepreneurs pursuing manufacturing projects, to R&D teams at Fortune 500 companies, to equipment providers, we think you’ll be blown away by what Roebling can do. 

And our name? The Roeblings were a 19th century engineering dynamo whose exploits should be better known and celebrated. John Augustus Roebling came to the United States from Germany in 1831. As an engineer, he eventually convinced New York planners to build what was then considered incredibly ambitious: a crossing over the East River linking Manhattan and Brooklyn. When John died as a result of an accident during the bridge’s construction, his son Washington assumed project responsibility, and when Washington himself succumbed to construction-induced decompression sickness, his wife Emily stepped up to complete the project. Opened on May 24, 1883 the Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension span in the world and included novelties like steel-wire cables. It remains an unmistakable emblem of American engineering audacity.

We hope Roebling will now continue that legacy and become an important piece of a new industrial age. 

Get a demo of Roebling.