Epoch Biodesign Secures Oversubscribed Series A Funding

Epoch Biodesign Secures Oversubscribed $18.3 Million Series A Funding to Scale its Breakthrough Enzymatic Recycling Technology

The Series A round is led by the climate-focused fund Extantia Capital, with Day One Ventures, Happiness Capital, Kibo Invest, Lowercarbon Capital and others also participating alongside Inditex, and a $1M grant from the U.K. government. Epoch Biodesign’s total capital raised to date is now $34 million, including the latest raise.

Founded in 2019 in London, Epoch Biodesign now a 30+ strong multidisciplinary team of chemists, biologists and software engineers. It will be using the new funding to scale up production of their plastic-eating enzymes. This means transferring the biorecycling process from the labs where they’ve been developing it to their first production facility this year, which founder Jacob Nathan says will be able to gobble through 150 tonnes per year of waste once it’s up and running.

Production of the enzyme itself involves a microorganism that’s been genetically engineered to include the DNA for making the enzyme and housed in a fermenter so it can replicate and churn out lots of the plastic digesting stuff — a synthetic biology technique that’s used for many other types of applications, from producing chemicals to novel foods.

Epoch wants to lend a helping hand to evolutionary ingenuity by using technology tools to accelerate the discovery of biological catalysts that can tackle plastic waste fast. And key to unlocking this mission are developments in generative AI — specifically the rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) — that are helping accelerate the search for biological agents that can be precision targeted at this problem.

The world’s plastic waste problem is staggeringly vast, with some 400 million tonnes of the stuff produced annually, according to the UN. Only a tiny fraction of which gets recycled currently being as, in crude cost terms, it’s far cheaper to pump out more virgin plastic than deal with processing the stuff we’ve already produced.

A key part of why Epoch is able to drive down recycling costs is the fact its process doesn’t require high temperatures to run — saving on energy costs compared to other forms of recycling which require the waste to be heated and/or melted. Nathan also points out that this means a lower capex for this (lower power) recycling facility — shrinking overall project costs.

Source: TechCrunch