Our portfolio

The world’s 1st self-driving lab for CO2 utilisation R&D

Dunia

Opportunity

The development of viable catalysts is the critical bottleneck in key net zero technologies, holding back new carbon neutral processes in everything from chemicals to mineral extraction. Today, catalyst development takes 20 years and up to $30m per candidate, with search spaces of up to 10^60 possible combinations for each process.

Solution

Dunia is developing the world’s 1st self-driving lab for CO2 Utilisation Catalysis, reducing time & cost to market by up to 90%. They are targeting critical chemical pathways such as CO2-to-Ethylene first, where no viable process exists and potential savings for the customer run into the hundreds of millions.

Converting wastewater treatment into a carbon neutral and net energy positive industry

Aquature

Opportunity

Green hydrogen is necessary for our energy transition, but current approaches to generate green hydrogen are not economic and subsidy-dependent. The biomass in wastewater is a great source for green hydrogen which remains untouched today. Current wastewater treatment processes primarily convert biomass to sludge, CO2 and methane, contributing 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Solution

Aquature generates green hydrogen by treating wastewater and removing 99% of organics in it, by splitting it into energy, CO2, nutrients and clean water. Energy is recovered as hydrogen at 85% efficiency and nutrients and CO2 are converted into green chemicals and treated water. Customers gain access to green hydrogen from £2/kg with a service fee 40% lower than average.

Sustainable marine protein - no ocean required

Aquanzo

Opportunity

Marine fish and shrimps require proteins to grow. However, natural sources like forage fish and zooplankton are limited and fully exploited. 90% of marine protein supply is already overexploited, while the performance of plant based marine aquaculture is not providing enough protein for optimal marine fish and shrimp performance.

Solution

Aquanzo is pioneering the first scalable Zooplankton farming system. The process uses aquaculture recirculating systems and agricultural byproducts to produce zooplankton biomass and process it to a high-quality protein-rich powder to sell to marine aquafeed manufacturers. This will allow the aquaculture industry to access the first ocean-independent sustainable marine ingredient.

Restoring the underground network of forests

Rhizocore

Opportunity

Trees are highly reliant on symbiosis with local mycorrhizal fungi strains. Reforesting clear-felled or ex-agricultural sites is challenging, with slower growth rates, higher tree mortality and lost potential for carbon sequestration.

Solution

Rhizocore Technologies produces locally-adapted mycorrhizal fungi to enhance tree planting success. By working with native fungi, we offer a sustainable solution to accelerate woodland regeneration, improve forest productivity, and increase natural capital benefits.

Direct Air Capture optimised for scale and supply chain stability

Parallel Carbon

Opportunity

Direct air capture (DAC) systems are needed to limit warming to 1.5C, but DAC in development today uses vast amounts of energy and rare materials,often requiring fossil fuels to run.

Solution

Parallel Carbon has developed renewable mineral looping for scalable direct air capture at rock-bottom costs, a virtually limitless low energy DAC solution. Once constructed, no further inputs are required. Sunshine, wind and minerals are combined in a renewable loop to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

World’s first high pressure, ultra-efficient electrolyser

Supercritical Solutions

Opportunity

Hydrogen is critical for the decarbonisation of hard to abate sectors such as fertiliser, steel and cement. Currently the production of hydrogen is reliant on steam methane reforming or electrolysers that deliver gas at low pressure, requiring further compression to be useful, whether that’s for storage, transport or usage.

Solution

Supercritical is developing the world’s first high pressure, ultra-efficient electrolyser, for the production of hydrogen and oxygen from water, with zero emissions. By using heat and pressure, their proprietary design exploits the benefits of supercritical water and delivers gases at over 200 bar of pressure, without the expense or challenges of hydrogen compressors.

Direct Air Capture optimised for deployability and energy-efficiency

Mission Zero Technologies

Opportunity

CO2 is not only an environmental issue: it is also a commodity, however today is produced exclusively as a waste product of other processes. This makes supply of CO2 inelastic to volume and location of demands.

Solution

Inspired by how the human body distributes CO2 from tissues to the lungs, Mission Zero produces high-grade CO2 continuously, on-demand and on-site. It is entirely electrically powered, consumes 3-4x less energy than existing thermal regeneration approaches, and leverages existing, scaled, mature technologies such as cooling towers and electrochemical water purification.

Dissolving boundaries to accelerated computing

XONAI

Opportunity

While big data analytics has become ubiquitous across modern data-driven businesses, today's proprietary data platforms are exceedingly intrusive; requiring customers to surrender data to monolithic systems designed to tax data movements in and out of closed ecosystems under the pretence that optimization can only be achieved through complete vendor lock-in.

Solution

Without changing a client’s underlying data infrastructure, XONAI seamlessly adapts to both existing and emerging hardware accelerators to power data analytics and AI computing; offering instant end-to-end optimization, seamless integration and scalable technology, with no risk of getting locked-in to a particular ecosystem or exposed to undue taxation

Next generation synthetic lethality

Enedra

Opportunity

Every cancer undergoes an evolutionary process which generates millions of mutationally and biologically diverse cells. As a result, synthetic lethality therapeutics raised against specific driver mutations only work in a limited subset of patients and only work until the cancer evolution strikes again, with drug resistance arising within a few months.

Solution

Enedra harnesses the power of Synthetic Lethality and Advanced Computational Systems Biology, to discover the first therapeutics that work against the complexity, biological and mutational heterogeneity of cancer.

Viral immunotherapy optimised for systemic delivery

Stratosvir

Opportunity

Therapeutic viruses offer huge potential to treat solid tumours but are typically destroyed rapidly by the patient’s immune system. Being limited to intratumoral injection, researchers have struggled for decades to safely and effectively harness this power, restricting their clinical use.

Solution

Stratosvir is developing improved viral immunotherapy, engineered to allow systemic delivery by avoiding immune clearance. This allows their cancer-killing virus to deliver medicinal payloads within the tumour to stimulate and reprogram the immune system to attack and destroy cancer.

Engineered bacteria to disrupt the tumour microenvironment

Neobe Therapeutics

Opportunity

Immunotherapy offers the potential to eradicate cancer, however today, only around 20% of patients with solid tumours can benefit from these cutting-edge treatments. Multiple factors contribute to this low level of efficacy, but chief among them is the existence of physical matrix barriers around the tumour that lead to the generation of an immune "excluded" microenvironment.

Solution

Neobe Therapeutics are harnessing the synthetic biology toolkit to engineer tumour-colonising bacteria that locally disrupt this microenvironment and enable the success of immunotherapies in current non-responders.

Next generation CAR-Ts, taking cell therapy into in vivo

Immtune

Opportunity

CAR-T therapy is a form of cancer treatment. These therapies currently only work well in blood cancers (less than 4% of total cases) and require therapeutic cells to be modified and grown outside the body. This highly complex and expensive process doesn’t work for everyone, results in cells of variable quality, and treatments that costs hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Solution

ImmTune Therapies is developing therapies that allow the patient’s body to develop these therapeutic cells themselves; which is considerably cheaper, and produces more effective products.

Next generation of mineral-based building insulation

Thermulon

Opportunity

Decarbonisation of heating systems has proven more challenging than providing electricity from clean energy sources: heating buildings, largely with natural gas, accounts for nearly a quarter of UK emissions. More effective insulation can reduce the energy required to heat these buildings but this has traditionally come at the expense of fire-safety and price.

Solution

Thermulon develops aerogels for building insulation. Aerogels are the most insulating materials known to man. Thermulon's aerogels are the first to beat the tradeoff between fire-safety, thermal performance and price.

AI-driven exploration for the critical minerals required to advance the energy transition

Optic Earth

Opportunity

Despite the growing demand for renewable energy materials, new investments in critical minerals are insufficient. Peaking copper deposits and ore quality risk disrupting supply. In addition, legacy mining exploration can take up to 15 years to reach mine production as it involves manually evaluating geologic and geophysical data over small regions, a process too slow to meet our climate goals.

Solution

Optic Earth's digital exploration platform fuses terabytes of data into a single subsurface model. This allows them to identify a pipeline of new exploration opportunities across thousands of kilometres and to see deeper than conventional shallow exploration programmes, revealing $Trillions of minerals others struggle to find.

Direct Air Capture optimised for minimum efficient scale and maximum theoretical efficiency

Holy Grail

Opportunity

Solid state electrochemical direct air capture has the lowest theoretical energy requirement for separating CO2 from ambient air, but the state of the art is progressing too slowly to bring this technology to market in time to avert the climate crisis.

Solution

Holy Grail use massively parallelised robotics and state of the art intelligent experimental design to automate the development and optimisation of solid state electrochemical direct air capture. They will produce modular direct air capture devices small enough to be installed anywhere.

Unlocking microbiome through bacteriophage

Ancilia

Opportunity

The gut microbiome has been implicated in a number of chronic diseases. Bacterial therapies offer promise to restore the healthy composition of the gut and treat disease, but many of these therapies do not effectively populate the gut. One hypothesis is that this consistent failure is due to native bacteriophage that prey on live bacterial therapeutics introduced to the gut.

Solution

Ancilia are developing a new class of engineered bacterial therapies, resistant to pathological phages, that effectively alter the human to treat the growing number of diseases linked to the microbiome.

Diagnosing and treating microbiome diseases before symptoms start

CC Bio

Opportunity

Current microbiome companies view the microbiome as either healthy or diseased but this is not reflective of the fact that microbiome diseases occur gradually over time.

Solution

CC Bio are using synthetic biology to sense the presence of harmful bacteria and produce targeted therapeutic products to neutralise them. Their automated discovery platform enables rapid identification and prototyping of similar technologies for multiple other disease indications (<4 weeks), including skin health, gut health and dental health, as well as drug metabolism.

A breakthrough strategy for neuroprotection

Reflection Therapeutics

Opportunity

Neuroinflammation, or chronic inflammation in the brain, has a crucial role in many devastating diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Multiple Sclerosis and many rare illnesses affecting brain function. An innovative drug that effectively targets neuroinflammation will profoundly benefit these patients as well as capture a large share of an estimated $45Bn market.

Solution

Reflection Therapeutics is developing targeted anti-inflammatory cell therapies to reduce neuroinflammation, protect neurons and increase synaptic connectivity, which will prevent a decline in cognitive function.

Transparent noise cancellation

DeNoize

Opportunity

Studies have shown that long-term exposure to traffic noise affects human blood biochemistry, causes cognitive impairment and behavioural issues in children and The World Health Organization calculating that at least 1m healthy life-years are lost every year in western European countries. In today’s urban world, it is crucial that we insulate ourselves from noise exposure.

Solution

DeNoize have developed Harmony Glass, an active noise-cancelling kit, that fits onto any existing window frame and capable of cancelling up to 90% of outside noise, while still allowing light to pass through unimpeded.

Predicting the evolution of cancer

ConcR

Opportunity

Treatment resistance is responsible for 90% of cancer related deaths and consumes approximately 30% of the total cancer care spend.

Solution

ConcR combines cutting edge machine learning techniques and knowledge of tumour progression. Concr’s software provides drug developers with insights on appropriate in vivo models, patient populations and stratification biomarkers, as well as giving clinicians evidence-based outputs of patient-specific cancer progression, enabling therapy adaptation before treatment resistance arises.

Fully automated cell manufacturing platform

Mytos

Opportunity

A significant component of biotech is manual preparation and growth of cells. This is expanding exponentially as therapeutics themselves become cell-based, most notably in cancer treatment. This is not just a significant time sink, it often involves significant waste, scope for human error and limits reproducibility.

Solution

Mytos have developed a system to fully automate cell manufacturing. Each machine completes the work of 10 scientists, whilst also reducing wastage and improving consistency.

Software eats engineering design

The Engineering Company

Opportunity

Engineering design is one of the most expensive, slow moving processes in the development of new technology, dependent on top down direction from senior engineering leads and implementation and iteration by a large cohort of junior engineers. Despite work often being similar across tasks and industries, each must be done manually in the precise engineering context.

Solution

The Engineering Company automates the majority of manual execution work within an engineering company: 30x cheaper, 12x faster and with an 8x smaller team. They’re backed by senior figures at NASA, ESA and BAE Systems.

Making surgery safer

Scalpel

Opportunity

Patient safety in surgery is a serious global public health concern. Approximately 42.7 million adverse events occur in patients annually, with at least 7 million people a year experiencing disabling surgical complications and each OR delay costing $7000-$8000 per operating room day. There is an urgent need to upgrade current operating theatres.

Solution

Scalpel integrates data from healthcare records, AI-based analytics, sensors within the operating room and clinical actions to improve patient safety and operating theatre efficiency.

Better soil health

P.E.S. Technologies

Opportunity

Despite advancements in precision agriculture, we are in the midst of a global decline in crop yields. The root cause is a lack of soil health data availability for farmers to make effective soil management decisions: from which fertiliser to use to whether they ought to employ “no till” strategies.

Solution

PES Technologies have developed an ultra-portable device capable of measuring microbial activity in soil. In contrast to sequencing, PES’s technology identifies what bacteria are doing, rather than which bacteria are present, by assessing emissions of volatile organic compounds, finally allowing farmers to gain a clear understanding of their soil health.

Mechanical motion reinvented

New Motion Labs

Opportunity

Downtime from roller chain breakages is often the single largest source of unexpected expense for manufacturers. The “roller chain” has not been re-designed in more than 300 years and suffers from a number of limitations: wear means they must be made out of high density metal, lubricated regularly and cannot be reduced beyond a certain size.

Solution

New Motion Labs are re-designing power transmissions with a re-designed chain that is compatible with existing systems, but lasts ten times longer before breaking, can be made of materials other than metal (carbon fibre, plastic, reducing weight), does not need to be lubricated (reducing maintenance costs) and can be miniaturised.

One day de novo antibody design

Antiverse

Opportunity

60% of therapeutics are antibody-based. The discovery process is often longer than 18 months and costs hundreds of thousands of pounds, largely based on trial and error: testing of “libraries” of millions of antibodies against the target to see what “binds”, with no guarantee that the library contains the desired antibody.

Solution

Using a combination of robotics, state of the art machine learning and cell-free protein synthesis, Antiverse aims to be the first company in the world capable of developing antibody drug candidates in one day for any given antigen.

Making better insects

Beta Bugs

Opportunity

As a growing global middle-class demands more meat, existing livestock feed supply chains are struggling to keep up. Insects, 150x more space efficient than soy, are a great replacement. Insect farms are growing at 100% CAGR but all rely on the use of “wild type” insect strains.

Solution

Beta Bugs evolve better insects, using their world-first protocol for insect evolution to breed black soldier flies which are rich in Omega 3 for the aquaculture feed market. They have also designed modular, scalable breeding units that are 100x more space efficient than the trait development technology used in academia.

Energy efficient, scalable bioprocessing

uFraction8

Opportunity

The bio-economy holds enormous potential: everything from fuel to therapeutics and food can be produced in modified bacteria, algae and yeast. The existing challenge is the unscalable, energy-intensive separation process, with high up-front capital costs of centrifuges and operational expense of liquid particle separation (often more than a third of total cost of production).

Solution

uFraction8 provides massively scalable bioprocessing without pre-concentration steps, filters, membranes or flocculants. It does not clog, does not have a theoretical size limit and significantly reduces energy costs, which currently represent the highest proportion of costs for producers.

Non-toxic adhesives powered by ML

Materialize.X

Opportunity

In high volume, low margin manufacturing processes such as the production of engineered wood, steel and high value chemicals, any problem that arises represents direct impact on bottom line. The complexity of these processes, combined with the right timeframes required to correct issues, means that human production managers are forced to react suboptimally and are rarely able to pre-empt issues.

Solution

MaterializeX have developed “Leon.x AI”, a tool to guide decision making processes in real time in manufacturing plants, started with the engineered wood industry. The system uses dynamic predictive analytics based on reinforcement learning, which for the first time, enables their customers to predict and optimise in real time.

Our portfolio

Featured companies:

Immtune

Opportunity

Solution

XONAI

Opportunity

Solution

Mission Zero Technologies

Opportunity

Solution

Rhizocore

Opportunity

Solution

Dunia

Opportunity

Solution

Aquature

Opportunity

Solution

Aquanzo

Opportunity

Solution

Rhizocore

Opportunity

Solution

Parallel Carbon

Opportunity

Solution

Supercritical Solutions

Opportunity

Solution

Mission Zero Technologies

Opportunity

Solution

XONAI

Opportunity

Solution

Enedra

Opportunity

Solution

Stratosvir

Opportunity

Solution

Neobe Therapeutics

Opportunity

Solution

Immtune

Opportunity

Solution

Thermulon

Opportunity

Solution

Optic Earth

Opportunity

Solution

Holy Grail

Opportunity

Solution

Ancilia

Opportunity

Solution

CC Bio

Opportunity

Solution

Reflection Therapeutics

Opportunity

Solution

DeNoize

Opportunity

Solution

ConcR

Opportunity

Solution

Mytos

Opportunity

Solution

The Engineering Company

Opportunity

Solution