Business Roundup

Hexion has completed its emergence from bankruptcy. The Ohio-based chemical maker says it has reduced its debt by more than $2 billion, received an infusion of $300 million in capital through a rights offering, and raised about $2 billion in exit financing.

Celanese says it will end production of cellulose acetate flake at its facility in Ocotlán, Mexico, citing a pending increase in output by Chinese competitors. Last year the firm said it would end production of acetate tow at the site.

Avantium is one of eight companies to be awarded a total of $7 million by the European Union to advance production of chemicals from renewable raw materials. Avantium will provide sugars from nonfood feedstock and develop a plant-based process for making ethylene glycol.

Umicore has raised about $450 million from institutional US investors. The Belgian company plans to spend some of the money on lithium-ion battery material development and recycling.

Aromyx, a Mountain View, California, start-up, has raised $3 million in seed funding. The company is developing a bioassay that it claims can reliably capture taste and odor signals sent to the human brain from the tongue and nose.

Sumitomo Chemical and the French firm Isorg will work together to develop organic photodetectors for use as camera sensors and smartphone fingerprint sensors. Isorg was founded in 2010 and raised $27 million in funding last year.

Vaxess Technologies has completed an $8.2 million series A fundraising. The Cambridge, Massachusetts–based firm is developing silk fibroin, a structural protein found in silk, as a material for dermal drug delivery.

Atomwise, a developer of artificial intelligence technology for drug discovery, is joining with the screening compound developer Enamine to create a 10 billion-compound virtual drug-screening library. The partners are targeting university cancer researchers.