The British startup, which emerged from founder Jacob Nathan’s school science project on using enzymes to break down plastic waste, has raised $18.3 million in funding.
The British startup, which emerged from founder Jacob Nathan’s school science project on using enzymes to break down plastic waste, has raised $18.3 million in funding.
Founded in 2019 in London, Epoch Biodesign now has over 30 strong multidisciplinary teams of chemists, biologists, and software engineers, TechCrunch reports.
The startup will use the raised investment to scale up production of plastic-degrading enzymes. That means moving the biorecycling process from the labs where the team developed the enzymes to its first production facility this year, which Nathan says will be able to process 150 tons of waste per year once it’s up and running.
The publication points to a growing number of startups working on technologies aimed at recycling plastic waste from various angles. In particular, startups using artificial intelligence to speed up the sorting of plastics for recycling, and others developing plastic alternatives that don’t rely on fossil fuels. But biorecycling, which relies on biological creatures to help break down persistent waste, is where Epoch Biodesign hopes to make its contribution to plastic recycling.
Biotechnologists are developing a library of plastic-degrading enzymes to break the cycle of plastic pollution by launching a circular economy based on biorecycling—starting with several types of plastics used in common synthetic fabrics. The first materials they have developed enzymes for are polyester and two types of nylon (nylon 6 and nylon 66).
«The problem with biology is that it’s too complex. People don’t understand how it works. We’ll never be able to rationalize it. Most of the biological questions we have remained unanswered. So the big shift here has been our ability to understand large, complex data sets—which is essentially AI,» Nathan explains.
He describes enzyme design as a «ridiculously large search issue» to solve. But by turning to GenAI, the startup’s scientists were able to shorten the process of sifting through possible combinations of amino acids and proteins to come up with potentially useful agents—by refining the LLM with information about proteins and amino acids, as well as by introducing «in-house data» from their own lab work on plastic-degrading enzymes.
«In our lab, we’ve been able to create tens of thousands of unique enzymes that break down plastic,» he says, explaining that after the AI models produce promising candidates, they move on to lab tests and then feed more data from their «predicted enzyme» results to continue iterating the model until the search results in «an enzyme that works the way we want it to.»
The funds raised by Epoch Biodesign will be used to scale up and increase the production of enzymes already developed using artificial intelligence. Epoch forecasts that the number of employees will double this year, and the first industrial production launch will take place in 2028.
Last year, it became known that Releaf Paper, which, without the help of AI, transformed from a school project by Valentyn Frechka into a Ukrainian eco-startup making paper from fallen leaves, plans to develop a new type of raw material.
In the fall of 2024, the world’s first producer of pulp and paper from fallen leaves, Releaf Paper, successfully launched the world’s first pilot production line based on fallen leaves in France.
