A British startup, from founder Jacob Nathan’s High School Science Project about the use of enzymes to break down plastic waste, has protected an oversubs $ 18.3 million in Serie A finance.
Founded in 2019 in London, Epoch Bodesign Now a 30+ strongly multidisciplinary team of chemists, biologists and software. It will use the new financing to scale up the production of their plastic -eating enzymes. This means that the biorecycling process is transferred from the laboratories where they have developed this year to their first production facility, which he says it will be able to search 150 tonnes of waste per year as soon as it is active.
After that, the first production runs of commercial scale capacity are expected by 2028, if not before, because Nathan says that the startup is looking for ways to accelerate the scale. They will roughly double the size of the team for the next 12 months while they work to switch to a higher gear, he says Techcrunch.
Plastic not so fantastic
Back a step back, the problem of the world’s plastic waste is amazingly enormous, with around 400 million tonnes of the stuff produced annually, according to the UN. Only a small fraction that is being recycled is currently, in rough costs, it is much cheaper to pump more virgin plastic than to deal with the processing of the things we have already produced.
At the same time, the environmental and health costs of uncontrolled plastic pollution are grim. So there is a growing pressure on it Regulators to act on plastic pollution And about companies that use plastic in their products to clean up their act.
There are also a growing number of startups that work on technologies that focus on plastic waste from different angles inclusive startups that apply AI to speed up the sorting of plastics for recycling and others who develop non-fossil fuel-based plastic alternatives. But biorecycling, so leaning on biological entities to break down resistant waste, is where Epoch Bodesign hopes to leave its mark on plastics.
The biotech develops a library of plastic-eating enzymes with the aim of disrupting the plastic pollution cycle by raising circularity-based circularity with a handful of plastics used in common synthetic substances. The first materials they have developed enzymes to tackle are polyester and two types of nylon (nylon 6 and nylon 66).
A graphic animation of the process on His website Shows waste clothing that goes in on the one hand, industrially sorted and/or pre-treated, depolymerized, purified and repolymerized, and then ready-made nylon (extrusion) or polyester (pellets) from the other end.
Genai to the rescue?
Although some plastic eating enzymes have been discovered in nature, the catch is that they are terribly Slowly when digesting this stuff – much too slow to help humanity escape from its plastic waste on every useful timetable. It is also the case that we have produced many more types of plastics than enzymes have been found in the wild that they can break down so far. And as the plastic keeps stacking, the need for speed increases.
Epoch wants to give a helping hand to evolutionary ingenuity by using technological tools to speed up the discovery of biological catalysts that can tackle plastic waste quickly. And the key to unlocking this mission is developments in generative AI – in particular the rise of powerful large language models (LLMS) – that help to speed up the search for biological agents that may accurately focus on this problem.
“The challenge with biology is that it is just too complicated,” Nathan explains. “People don’t understand how it works. We will never be able to rationalize it. Most of these biological questions we have remain unanswered. So the great shift here has been our ability to understand large, complex data sets-somewhat effective AI. “
“We are just a bit at the cake to put things back on the other side,” he also says about what this biorecycling process comes down to. He adds that it only needs a “matter of hours” to go from waste to recovering molecular identical material (nylon or polyester) in a form that is ready to reuse to make new clothing or other products.
He describes the enzyme design as a “ridiculously large search problem” to tackle. But by turning to Genai, the scientists of the startup have essentially been able to be smashing through possible combinations of amino acid and proteins to land on potentially usable agents-fermentation LLMs with information about proteins and amino acids, but also feed in “pierced data” from plastic.
“We have been able to generate the tens of thousands of plastic-eating enzymes in our lab that are unique,” he says, and explains that after requesting the AI models to deliver promising candidates that they switch to Laboratory Tests and then more data from their results in the “predicted enzymen” to retain the model. “
“What we do effectively is that we concentrate hundreds of millions of years, billions of years of evolution in some cycles in the laboratory that take place over the course of days, weeks, months,” he adds. “We make large evolutionary jumps that are very unlikely that there is simply naturally based on random mutations, natural selection.”
The AI-driven enzyme design of Epoch has also enabled it to get “fairly regularly” speed improvements on enzymes in the region of 25x, according to Nathan.
“That means that we can use less enzyme in our process,” he notes. “We can make less of it. The [capital expenditure] associated with the production that enzyme is falling in the first place. And in the end all of that translates into a lower costs of goods for output. “
“We are not the only company trying to design biology to do different things … But we really think we are quite unique in the approach that we follow to apply these tool sets to recycling – and then to our taste of recycling: biorecycling,” he adds.
Focus on costs and commercial scale
Until now, the startup has built three “best-in-class processes to recycle three very chemically different types of plastics” and the scaling of those to commercially useful volumes is the next on the slate with the new Serie A Cash.
“This year we are building our first production facility in the UK for our first nylon process,” he says, claiming: “These technologies use completely new biochemines. They shift the cost basis of recycling entirely in new areas that actually recycles the cheaper option compared to Virgin.”
An important part of the reason why Epoch is able to lower recycling costs is the fact that the process does not require high temperatures to work – save on energy costs compared to other forms of recycling that require the waste to be heated and/or melted. Nathan also points out that this means a lower capex for this (lower current) recycling facility – shrinking total project costs.
The biological recycling process is also “incredibly high yield” compared to industrial recycling – he says they reach more than 90%, which means that the majority of the waste that is entered is returned to a reusable state.
Moreover, there are no “unwanted by -products” of biorecycling – which again reduces the costs and complexity of recycling the plastic.
“In principle, all these things count to reduce the costs across the board of the process and to bring ourselves into a position where we – on that commercial scale – reach competitiveness with the materials that are made on the market of fossil carbon today,” he suggests.
The production of the enzyme itself includes a micro -organism that is genetically designed to include the DNA for making the enzyme and housed in a fermenter, so that it can replicate and accelerate much of the plastic digesting things – a synthetic biology technique used for many other types of applications.
The approach of epoch for recycling plastic can have a number of extra advantages, because Nathan suggests that it can include extra purification – by ‘the enzymes also’ scrubbing ‘ – because some plastic contain chemicals that can cause causing the material.
Although he admits that even biorecycling of plastics will not solve the problem of microplastics, where small pieces of plastic can rinse from clothing that are made of synthetic substances and find their way to the environment – which makes a danger to biological life.
Yet he claims that we are stuck to use synthetic plastic for decades, and adds: “I think it is really important that new synthetic plastic is made of old materials, not from newly extracted fossil carbon.”
Designing enzymes to digest other types of plastic waste – such as packaging – is a broader goal for the startup. Although Nathan says that they are first focused on substances, because it is a huge problem that also gets more public attention. The business case also looks cleaner.
In particular, the Serie A of the startup includes a strategic investment by the Spanish fast fashion giant Inditex, owner of clothing brand Zara, who has a multi-year “joint development agreement” with Epoch with a view to improving the sustainability of its company in a time of rising public awareness. The role of fashion industry in the global plastic crisis.
“We want to produce material that is actually useful,” Nathan notes. “We want to produce something for noticing that, you know, cannot be distinguished from the things they use today – so to be true, we have to go through different tests. We have to do this on larger and larger and larger scale. And so the machines of a company such as Inditex effectively have with the scale they just have to speed up that process. “
The Series A-round is led by the climate-oriented Fund Extantia Capital, with day one Ventures, Happiness Capital, KIBO Invest, LowerCarbon Capital and others who also participate with Inditex and a $ 1 million subsidy from the British government. The total capital of Epoch Bodesign is now $ 34 million, including the last increase.
