A startup from the U.K., which originated from its founder Jacob Nathan’s high school science project focused on utilizing enzymes to break down plastic waste, has successfully secured $18.3 million in Series A funding, exceeding its initial target.

Established in 2019 in London, Epoch Biodesign has grown into a multidisciplinary team of over 30 chemists, biologists, and software engineers. The company plans to use the newly acquired funds to scale up the production of its plastic-eating enzymes. This involves transitioning the biorecycling process from laboratory development to its first production facility, which is expected to be operational this year and capable of processing 150 tonnes of waste annually.

Following this, the startup anticipates initiating its first production runs at commercial scale by 2028, or possibly sooner, as it explores ways to accelerate the scaling process. Over the next 12 months, the team size is expected to roughly double as the company works towards enhancing its operations, according to Nathan’s statement to TechCrunch.

Plastic not-so-fantastic

Taking a step back, the issue of plastic waste globally is alarmingly vast, with approximately 400 million tonnes of plastic produced annually, as reported by the UN. Currently, only a minimal fraction of this plastic is recycled, largely due to the cost factor, as producing new virgin plastic is significantly cheaper than processing existing plastic waste.

Concurrently, the environmental and health consequences of unchecked plastic pollution are severe. This has led to increasing pressure on regulators to address plastic pollution and on businesses that utilize plastic in their products to adopt more sustainable practices.

There is a growing number of startups focusing on technologies aimed at combating plastic waste from various angles, including those applying AI to enhance plastic sorting for recycling and others developing non-fossil fuel-based plastic alternatives. However, Epoch Biodesign is focusing on biorecycling, leveraging biological entities to break down resistant waste, as its approach to tackling plastics.

The biotech company is developing a library of plastic-eating enzymes with the objective of disrupting the plastic pollution cycle by promoting biorecycling-based circularity. Initially, it is targeting a handful of plastics used in common synthetic fabrics, including polyester and two types of nylon (nylon 6 and nylon 66).

A graphical animation on its website illustrates the process, starting with waste garments and ending with ready-to-use nylon or polyester, showcasing the company’s innovative approach to recycling.

GenAI to the rescue?

While some plastic-eating enzymes have been discovered in nature, they are extremely slow in digesting plastic, making them ineffective in addressing the plastic waste issue on a useful timescale. Additionally, the diversity of plastics produced exceeds the number of enzymes found that can break them down.

Epoch aims to accelerate the discovery of biological catalysts that can efficiently tackle plastic waste by leveraging technology tools. A key component of this mission is the development of generative AI, particularly powerful large language models (LLMs), which are facilitating the search for biological agents that can be precision-targeted at this problem.

“The challenge with biology is its complexity, which humans don’t fully understand and cannot rationalize,” explains Nathan. “The big shift here has been our ability to comprehend large, complex datasets, effectively through AI.”

Nathan describes the biorecycling process as essentially “un-baking the cake and then putting things back together at the other end.” He highlights that it only takes a “matter of hours” to transform waste fabrics into molecularly identical material (nylon or polyester) ready for reuse in making new clothes or products.

Enzyme design is characterized as a “ridiculously large search problem.” However, by utilizing GenAI, the startup’s scientists have been able to shortcut the process of sifting through possible combinations of amino acids and proteins to identify potentially useful agents. They fine-tune LLMs with information on proteins and amino acids, along with proprietary data from their lab work on plastic-eating enzymes.

“We’ve been able to generate tens of thousands of plastic-eating enzymes in our lab that are unique,” Nathan says, explaining that after querying the AI models for promising candidates, they conduct lab tests and feed in more data from the results on the “predicted enzymes” to keep iterating the model until they find an enzyme that performs as desired.

“What we’re effectively doing is concentrating hundreds of millions of years, billions of years of evolution into a few cycles in the lab that happen over the course of days, weeks, months,” he adds. “We’re making big evolutionary jumps that would be very unlikely to happen just naturally based on random mutations, natural selection.”

Epoch’s AI-driven enzyme design search has also enabled it to achieve speed improvements on enzymes in the region of 25x, according to Nathan.

“That means we can use less enzyme in our process,” he notes. “We can make less of it. The capital expenditure associated with manufacturing that enzyme in the first place goes down. And ultimately, all of that translates into a lower cost of goods for output.”

“We’re not the only company trying to design biology to do different things … but we really think we’re quite unique in the approach we’re taking in applying these tool sets to recycling — and then to our flavor of recycling: biorecycling,” he adds.

Focus on cost and commercial scale

To date, the startup has developed three “best-in-class processes to recycle three very chemically distinct types of plastics.” The next step, with the new Series A funding, is to scale these processes to commercially useful volumes.

“We’re building our first production facility in the U.K. this year for our first nylon process,” Nathan says, claiming that these technologies use entirely new biochemistries, which shifts the cost base of recycling into new areas, making recycling the cheaper option compared to virgin materials.

A key aspect of how Epoch drives down recycling costs is that its process doesn’t require high temperatures, saving on energy costs and reducing the capex for the recycling facility, thereby shrinking overall project costs.

The biological recycling process is also “incredibly high yield” compared to industrial recycling, with yields of upwards of 90%, meaning most of the waste fed in is reclaimed in a reusable state.

Additionally, there are no unwanted side products from biorecycling, which further reduces the cost and complexity of recycling the plastic.

“All of these things add up, basically, to reduce cost across the board of the process and get us into a position where — at that commercial scale — we’re reaching cost competitiveness with the materials that are on the market today made from fossil carbon,” Nathan suggests.

Production of the enzyme itself involves a microorganism genetically engineered to include the DNA for making the enzyme, housed in a fermenter to replicate and produce large quantities of the plastic-digesting enzyme, a common technique in synthetic biology.

Epoch’s approach to recycling plastic could offer additional benefits, such as incorporating purification by having the enzymes “scrub” undesirable chemicals, as some plastics contain chemicals that pose concerns for recycling.

Although biorecycling of plastics won’t solve the issue of microplastics, where tiny plastic pieces can wash out of synthetic fabrics and harm the environment, Nathan emphasizes the importance of using existing materials for new synthetic plastic production rather than extracting more fossil carbon.

Designing enzymes to digest other types of plastic waste, such as packaging, is a broader goal for the startup, with an initial focus on fabrics due to the significant problem it poses and the clearer business case.

Notably, the startup’s Series A funding includes a strategic investment by Spanish fast fashion giant Inditex, owner of the clothing brand Zara, which has entered into a multi-year joint development agreement with Epoch. This partnership aims to improve the sustainability of Inditex’s business amidst growing public awareness of the fashion industry’s role in the global plastic crisis.

“We want to produce material that’s actually useful,” Nathan notes. “We want to produce something for brands that is indistinguishable from the stuff that they’re using today — so in order for that to be true, we need to go through various tests. We need to do this at larger and larger scale. And so having, effectively, the machinery of a business like Inditex with the scale that they have just helps us accelerate that process.”

The Series A round is led by the climate-focused fund Extantia Capital, with participation from Day One Ventures, Happiness Capital, Kibo Invest, Lowercarbon Capital, and others, alongside Inditex, and a $1M grant from the U.K. government. Epoch Biodesign has now raised a total of $34 million, including the latest funding round.