Potential thermochemistry replacements starred at Paris conference

Determination and innovation were both prerequisites for technology start-ups short-listed for Hello Tomorrow’s Global Summit technology competition, the final round of which was held in Paris in March. From over 4,000 start-ups around the world that entered the competition, just 70 were selected for a final round to showcase their technologies and a chance to win the event’s €100,000 ($108,000) grand prize or smaller prizes.

Many companies had quite the journey. With French air-​​traffic-​control strikes, Paris metro strikes, and the cancellation of trains from the UK, traveling to Paris proved to be a challenge for most of the event’s finalists and its 3,000 or so attendees. But the travel chaos didn’t seem to put off too many. All three auditoriums at the cavernous Centquatre-Paris north of the Seine River overflowed with attendees, while conversations between participants filled walkways.

The meeting, sponsored by several big industrial and financial firms, was billed as an event for deep-tech start-ups—an in-vogue term for young companies developing technologies that solve complex scientific or engineering problems. While software companies were strongly represented, so were firms practicing chemistry and biotechnology.

Arguably, the stars of the show were a handful of start-ups offering low-energy technologies for cracking or combining molecules. Their approaches often dovetailed with a theme among speakers in panel discussions: the pressing need to replace classical thermochemical processes that emit greenhouse gases.

“Every chemist in the room knows that you solve stuff with heat and pressure. Didn’t solve it? More heat, more pressure,” Yair Reem, a partner with the Berlin-based venture capital firm Extantia Capital, said during a panel discussion. “But we cannot do that anymore,” he said, citing the impacts of the Haber-Bosch process for producing ammonia—renowned years ago for enabling greater food production but now infamous for releasing huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“So we see a shift, and that is what I am excited about,” Reem said, pointing to emerging alternatives, including electrochemical processes. The alternatives need to deliver more than just software improvement, though, he warned. “CO₂ is a molecule. You can’t blockchain it.”

The German start-up and Hello Tomorrow competition finalist enaDyne is all about the molecules, including CO₂, instead of any software tweaks. The firm was in the French capital to showcase a reactor that uses nonthermal plasma catalysis to convert CO₂ and a hydrogen source—such as green methane—into chemicals and fuels in a single step. The technology can compete at or below the cost of traditional petrochemical processes and has fewer net greenhouse gas emissions, enaDyne CEO and cofounder Philipp Hahn said. He spoke during a 3 min company pitch to a packed auditorium and a panel of judges from industry, academia, and finance.

enaDyne’s key development is a ceramic electrode material that enables plasma in the firm’s reactor to be ignited using less energy than usual. The electrode creates “a very dense overpopulation of electrons in the reactor. And we use that to energize the carbon dioxide that we put into the reactor instead of heating it up,” Hahn confirmed backstage after his presentation.

“And when you’re in plasma chemistry, you actually can generate reaction paths from the CO₂ directly through the C₁ to C₄ hydrocarbons, which is not possible with classical chemistry,” Hahn said.

Initially, the firm plans to partner with biomethane producers. US president Joe Biden’s nearly $370 billion Inflation Reduction Act for clean technologies has caught enaDyne’s attention. “Looking over the Atlantic to the US is definitely something that we are planning to do, especially this year,” Hahn said. enaDyne left Paris as the winner of a prize to have Boston Consulting Group—a sponsor of the event—as its strategic partner.

Watching Hahn’s presentation were Brent Cutcliffe and Chern-Hooi Lim, two of the cofounders of the start-up New Iridium. New Iridium would later win in the environment category for its light-powered catalysts that can make pharmaceuticals and other chemicals at low cost.

New Iridium is focused on three applications supported by its photocatalysis platform: CO₂ to chemicals, olefin production, and oxygenate production. The first application uses CO₂ and natural gas as its feedstocks to produce carbon-negative products. One benefit of the technology is that it both requires less energy than thermochemistry and reduces the number of chemical steps to a target molecule, said Lim, who is also New Iridium’s CEO and in 2021 was profiled in C&EN’s Talented 12 feature.

“In the world of chemistry, you are used to cranking up the heat, right? But we use light,” Lim said. “Because you have a different tool, you have different possibilities. . . . A new chemical process might come by every few decades. We want to be the developer of that technology.”

In contrast to New Iridium, the French start-up Sweetch Energy wants to harvest energy, not chemicals. It was chosen as the overall winner of the Hello Tomorrow competition, taking home the €100,000 grand prize. The firm generates emission-free energy with a nanoscale membrane that creates an electrical charge by exploiting the difference in salinity between river water and seawater when they meet. The world’s deltas and estuaries annually release almost 30,000 TW h of osmotic energy, an amount that exceeds the electricity required globally, the firm claims.

A number of start-ups were also in Paris to showcase membrane and filtration technologies for chemical processing. Among them was Singapore-based Seppure. Hafiiz Osman, the firm’s vice president of business development and operations, explained how it has created a polymer-based nanofiltration membrane with pores less than 1 nm in diameter that can selectively separate certain chemicals and recover solvents without heat.

He made some big claims. “Because we don’t use heat, we are able to cut energy consumption and carbon emissions by 90%, resulting in a 50% reduction in operating expenses,” Osman told the audience during his competition pitch. “We are on a mission to change the way processes are done in industry,” he said. Seppure has targeted vegetable oil refining before taking on petrochemicals.

Also competing in this space was Boston-​​based Osmoses, which has developed a polymeric membrane with the highest level of molecular selectivity ever recorded, CEO and cofounder Francesco Maria Benedetti said during his pitch. Benedetti estimated that cost savings over standard thermochemical separation processes are 40–50%. The membrane can separate hydrogen from hydrocarbons and can be applied to CO₂ capture. The company is looking to scale production of its proprietary polymer material, Benedetti said.

National University of Singapore spin-off Solv8 Technology reckoned that its nanofiltration membrane, for separating solvents at ambient temperature, such as in the production of flavors and fragrances, is even more efficient. In addition, it can cut costs 90% versus thermochemical separations, CEO Chunfeng Wan claimed in Paris. Solv8’s focus is on solvent recovery. It’s an approach that could save the world $180 billion in energy bills and 600 million metric tons of CO₂ emissions in the next 10 years, he said.

Another theme that bubbled up in presentations and discussions in Paris was the opportunity to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of chemical processes by replacing them with precision fermentation. The Israeli enzyme designer Enzymit was in Paris with software for inventing new enzymes rapidly by evaluating the functionality of each enzyme’s 3D structure.

The company’s approach converts desired catalytic function into a novel enzyme amino acid sequence and structure, said Gideon Lapidoth, Enzymit’s CEO and a cofounder, who was in Paris to meet with potential partners and investors. Among the advantages of the firm’s approach is that it can ensure a chosen enzyme is stable, he said.

Lapidoth says he is surprised by how much interest the technology is attracting from energy and chemical companies that are seeking to replace processes with those that have a lower carbon footprint. In such situations, Enzymit’s technology could be the solution, he said.

Another fermentation start-up was Gozen Bioworks, a Turkish firm that has developed a bacterial process for making faux leather for the fashion industry. Its raw material is an undisclosed cellulose-​rich plant.

Two years ago, Gozen was on the lookout for a European investor. It didn’t find one but instead raised funds through the New Jersey–based venture capital firm SOSV. This “was a game-changing experience for us,” Gozen cofounder and CEO Ece Gözen Akin said. “We achieved massive things in 6 months.” Part of the money the firm raised went toward building a pilot facility in Turkey.

Generally, venture capital funding of deep-tech companies is on an upward trend, said Jean-François Bobier of Boston Consulting Group. In 2022, $254 billion, or 19%, of global venture capital investment went into deep-tech, he said.

European deep-tech investment has been growing at a rate of about 50% per year in recent years, he said.

And a healthy number of deep-tech start-ups continue to emerge in Europe, Jean-David Malo, director of the European Innovation Council (EIC), said in a presentation at the Paris meeting. The EIC, a European Commission funding body, launched in March 2021 with the goal of creating more deep-tech start-ups across the European Union.

With a budget of almost $11 billion to invest in new technology companies between 2021 and 2027, the EIC could be a game changer when it comes to boosting deep-tech in Europe. The council received more than 3,000 funding applications from start-ups in 2022, up from fewer than 2,000 in 2021.

“It’s the most ambitious innovation program that we ever launched at the level of the European Union,” Malo said. With financial support for deep-tech start-ups strengthening in the region, don’t rule out another European firm as the winner of next year’s Hello Tomorrow Global Summit.