Chern-Hooi Lim

On a Friday evening in 2018, just before a 3-day weekend, Brent Cutcliffe got a text from one of his old badminton players. Chern-Hooi Lim wanted to talk about a business idea.

The two met in 2010, when Lim began a PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. Cutcliffe coached a local badminton club, and Lim had been playing since childhood. They sometimes talked about business. Cutcliffe was an executive at a cloud-computing start-up. Lim had taken some business classes as an undergraduate and once won third place in a business plan competition.

“Sure,” Cutcliffe replied. “When?” Lim wrote back: “Tonight.”

They spoke for a few hours. Lim wanted to start a company, and he was chasing a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Program grant. The deadline was in just 2 weeks, but Cutcliffe agreed to help. A couple of months later, the grant was funded. By January 2019, Cutcliffe had left his start-up to help out at Lim’s fledgling company.

That company, New Iridium, is developing new light-powered catalysts for making pharmaceuticals and other chemicals. New Iridium also advises companies on how to use these kinds of catalysts, whether they come from New Iridium or elsewhere. Lim has raised $2.5 million in nondilutive funding, and New Iridium has deals with AstraZeneca and other companies.

New Iridium was founded on photocatalysis. Catalysts are used widely in academia and industry to spur on chemical reactions. Using light rather than heat to fuel the reactions can be more energy efficient. Lim has spent much of his career developing organic photocatalysts, which don’t rely on expensive metals like iridium or ruthenium.

Research at a glance

Lim and colleagues designed this organic photocatalyst to replace the energy-intensive, hazardous metal catalysts used in Birch reduction reactions, which are used to make drugs and other valuable molecules.

Lim planted his first organic photocatalysis flag as a graduate student in Charles Musgrave’s computational chemical engineering lab. Another Colorado professor, Garret Miyake—now at Colorado State University—asked Lim and Musgrave to model some candidate molecules his group was exploring for atom transfer radical polymerization reactions, which are used to make plastics for food packaging and other products.

After modeling a few, Lim proposed they try some organic photocatalysts, eventually landing on several effective catalysts that also eliminate the chance of metal contamination in consumer products. The paper on the work was published in Science in 2016 and has been cited more than 400 times.

Lim extended those ideas to other processes, developing several other photoredox catalysts. Some are now sold by New Iridium. Along the way he added experimental skills to his quiver, first on his own in Musgrave’s computational group—Lim crowdfunded about $7,000 to buy reagents—and later as a postdoctoral researcher with Miyake, who is also a New Iridium cofounder.

Musgrave says that Lim demonstrated early on an ability to see the big picture and connect logical dots that lead to innovative leaps. Miyake calls Lim fearless, and says, “He’s probably the deepest thinker I’ve ever met.”

For Lim, the decision to start a company was about impact. He thinks his photocatalysts and photocatalysis in general can help usher in a more sustainable future. One of his earliest interests in chemistry was solving the problem of carbon dioxide and global climate change. He’s still working on it, exploring ways to use photocatalysis to make commercial chemicals from bioderived feedstocks or to convert CO₂ to methane, a feedstock for many chemical reactions.

“I don’t want to wait my whole life for someone to do it,” Lim says. “Why not do it myself?”

CORRECTION
This story was updated on Aug. 23, 2021, to correct the amount of funding New Iridium has raised. The company has raised $2.5 million in nondilutive funding, not $7 million in funding.