The UK startup, which originated from founder Jacob Nathan's high school science project on the use of enzymes to decompose plastic waste, was oversubscribed to $108.3 million in Series A funding.
Founded in London in 2019, Epoch Biodesign has become a team of over 30 powerful interdisciplinary chemists, biologists and software engineers. Using new funds, expand production of plastic-eating enzymes. This means that this year they will be relocating the Biol Cycling process from the lab where they are developing it into their first production facility.
After that, Nathan says the startup is looking for a way to accelerate scaling. They are working on switching to higher gear, so they will almost double the size of their team in the next 12 months, he told TechCrunch.
Plastic is not that rural
According to the United Nations, after two seconds of retreat, the global plastic waste problem is surprisingly vast, with around 400 million tons of production per year. Currently, under rough cost conditions, only a small portion is recycled so that it is much cheaper to pump more virgin plastic than to deal with the processing of what has already been produced.
At the same time, the environmental and health costs of unidentified plastic pollution are severe. This puts pressure on regulators to act on plastic contamination and companies to clean up their actions using plastic in their products.
In addition, more and more startups are working on technology targeting plastic waste from various angles. It includes applying AI to speed up sorting of plastics for recycling and developing non-fossil fuel-based plastic alternatives. However, bioraking is where epoch biodesigns want plastics to mark its mark as it leaning towards biological entities to break down resistant waste.
Biotechnology is developing a library of plastic pyrogenases with the aim of destroying the plastic contamination cycle by enhancing bioraking-based circulation. The first materials they developed enzymes to tackle are polyester and two types of nylon (nylon 6 and nylon 66).
The graphical animation of the website's processes depicts waste clothing at one end, bringing out industrially classified and/or pretreated, removed, refined, repolymerized, ready to use nylon (pellets).
Genai to the Rescue?
It has been discovered that some plastic-eating enzymes are naturally present, but the catch is that they are very slow to digest such things. They may also produce much more types of plastic than enzymes have been found in the wild. And as plastic continues to pile up, the need for speed increases.
Epoch hopes to lend aid to evolutionary ingenuity by using technology tools to accelerate the discovery of biological catalysts that can tackle plastic waste quickly. The key to unlocking this mission is the development of the rise of generator AI, particularly powerful leading language models (LLM), that will help accelerate the search for biological agents that may target this issue.
“The challenge to biology is that it's way too complicated,” explains Nathan. “Humans don't understand how it works. They can't be streamlined. Most of these biological questions that we remain unanswered. So the big change here is the ability to understand large, complex data sets. This is practically AI.”
“We're like putting things back on the other side without putting cake on it,” he also says of what the biorecycling process sums up. He added that he would simply “for hours” to retrieve molecularly identical materials (nylon or polyester) from waste fabrics, ready to be reused to make new clothes and other products.
He describes it as a “risky search problem” working on enzyme design. But by turning to Genai, startup scientists were able to sift through shortcuts to land on potentially useful agents via possible combinations of amino acids and proteins. Not only does it fine-tune protein and amino acid information to LLM, it also supplies “unique data” from its own lab work on plastic erodontic enzymes.
“We were able to produce enzymes that can get tens of thousands of plastics in a unique lab,” he says. He explains that after queriing AI models to generate promising candidates, he switches to lab testing, feeding more data from the results of the “predicted enzyme” and “continue repeating the model until you repeat the model until you need to search.”
“What we're doing effectively is focusing hundreds of millions of years of evolution in our lab on several cycles over weeks, weeks, months,” he adds. “We're making a big evolutionary jump that's very unlikely to happen naturally based on random mutations, natural selection.”
According to Nathan, Epoch's AI-driven enzyme design search allowed us to get 25x more speed improvements in enzymes in the region “quite regularly.”
“That means we can use fewer enzymes in our process,” he points out. “We can do that less. [capital expenditure] It is originally related to the production of that enzyme. And ultimately, all of that leads to low cost of the product. ”
“We are not the only company trying to design biology to do a variety of things…but we are very unique in our approach to applying these toolsets to recycling and working on recycling flavor: biorecycling,” he adds.
Focus on cost and commercial scale
So far, the startup is next to slate to scale to commercially useful volumes with the new Series A Cash by building three best-in-class processes and recycling three very chemically different types of plastics.
“We are building our first production facility in the UK this year for our first nylon process,” he says. They completely shift the cost base of recycling to new areas, essentially recycling cheaper options compared to virgins. ”
An important part of why epochs can reduce recycling costs is the fact that the process does not require high temperatures to run. Saves energy costs compared to other forms of recycling that require the waste to be heated and/or melted. Nathan also notes that this means lower facilities at this (low power) recycling facility, reducing the cost of the overall project.
Biological recycling processes also have “very high yields” compared to industrial recycling. He says it's more than 90%.
Plus, there are no “unwanted side products” from biorecycle. This reduces the cost and complexity of recycling plastics.
“All of these increase essentially to reduce the overall cost of the board of processes and to guide us at that commercial scale to a position where we are reaching a competitive cost with the materials we currently have in the markets made from fossil carbon,” he proposes.
The production of the enzyme itself contains microorganisms that have been genetically modified to contain DNA to make the enzyme, and are housed in fermenters to replicate and burn many plastic digests.
As plastics contain chemicals that can raise concerns in recycling materials, there are additional benefits to epoch's approach to recycling plastics, as enzymes suggest that Nathan can incorporate additional purification by “scrubing” unwanted chemicals.
He acknowledges that even the plastic Bior Cycle does not solve the problem of microplastics, where small pieces of plastic can be washed away from clothing made from synthetic fabrics and washed away by the environment, but poses a risk to biological life.
Still, he argued that we are stuck with the need to use synthetic plastics for decades, saying, “I think it's really important that new synthetic plastics are made from 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 startups. Nathan says they are focusing on fabrics first, as it is also a big issue that is attracting more general attention. The business case also looks beautiful.
In particular, the startup Series A includes a strategic investment by Spanish first fashion giant Inditex, the owner of clothing brand Zara. This Zara has enacted a multi-year “co-development agreement” with Epoch.
“We want to create materials that are actually useful,” Nathan said. “We want to create something for our brand, which means we can't tell from what they use today. For that to be true, we need to go through a variety of tests. We need to do this on a large scale and on a massive scale. And effectively, business machines like Inditex use scales that help accelerate that process.”
The Series A round is led by the existing capital of the climate-focused fund, with first-day ventures, happiness capital, Kibo Invest, LowerCarbon Capital and others joining Inditex, with a $1 million grant from the UK government. Epoch Biodesign's total capital raised so far is $34 million, including the latest salary increases.