The problem is that any source of low entropy energy will immediately get colonised by sophisticated organisms that that have billions of years of development over a bunch chemicals that have coalesced in a crack in rock or whatever. The origin of life was probably in very slow, unreliable, marginally-alive processes.

Those startups needed to be the only show in town to survive. They would now competing against modern organisms that have been through zillions of improvement cycles. It's like a F-18 versus a wooden stick.