Benson Hill, Inc. and its affiliated debtors are in Chapter 7 liquidation after the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware converted the cases on September 23, 2025, five months after a sale of substantially all operating assets had already closed. The conversion order took effect seven days after entry and followed a compressed Chapter 11 launched March 20, 2025, when the ag-tech debtor and its affiliates filed voluntary petitions Voluntary PetitionDkt. 1.
Benson Hill, a St. Louis company built around the CropOS crop-trait platform and ultra-high-protein soy ingredients, had gone public through a 2021 SPAC merger and traded under the ticker BHIL but never reached profitability. Per the first-day declaration of Interim CEO Daniel Cosgrove, the company ran a "Liquidity Improvement Plan" from March 2023, sold soy-crushing facilities in Seymour, Indiana ($35.4 million) and Creston, Iowa ($52.5 million), and completed a Grand Forks, North Dakota dry-pea facility transaction ($23.2 million) days before filing First Day DeclarationDkt. 16. A prepetition marketing process run by Piper Sandler reached dozens of parties but produced only one bid, which was rejected as insufficient. By the petition date the Debtors had retired their secured debt but were out of liquidity.
The Chapter 11 was engineered as a fast sale and wind-down rather than a reorganization. The Court authorized an $11 million senior secured superpriority DIP term loan facility by final order on April 23, 2025, building on interim authority of $3 million entered shortly after the petition. The Debtors then sold the operating business to Confluence Genetics by credit bid on May 23, 2025, leaving an estate with an estimated $385,000–$455,000 of remaining funds. With no going concern left to reorganize, the case moved toward conversion.
On September 23, 2025, the Court entered the order converting the cases to Chapter 7. Conversion is a DIP Termination Event under the final financing order, though the DIP liens and superpriority claims survive until the obligations are paid in full. The estate now carries a limited claims docket — roughly $11.0 million secured across four claims and $4.97 million unsecured across twelve — to be administered by a Chapter 7 trustee.
