HydRegen raises $8M to advance enzyme-based hydrogenation catalysts
The funds will enable HydRegen to expand collaboration with existing customers in the pharmaceutical and specialty chemical industries while accelerating adoption with new customers across chemicals, agrochemicals, materials and bulk chemicals.
Genoa Ventures led the financing, with participation from Clean Growth Fund and First Imagine! Ventures. Additional support came from Oxford Technology Management, Headington Holdings, Oxonian, Foxglove Capital and Rapid Innovation Group.
HydRegen’s main commercial focus is hydrogenation, a critical step in manufacturing chemicals. Conventional precious-metal catalyzed hydrogenation can be energy-intensive, difficult to optimize and increasingly challenging to operate within tightening environmental and regulatory requirements. HydRegen offers a biologically derived alternative for performing these reactions, which are essential to up to 20% of all processes in the trillion-dollar industrial chemicals market.
More specifically, HydRegen produces a hydrogenase enzyme through fermentation, which it then formulates into a suite of proprietary catalyst platforms that enable the same enzyme to perform hundreds of different hydrogenation reactions.
“Chemical manufacturing has been built around precious-metal catalysts for decades, creating an enormous global infrastructure optimized to use them. Biology can now perform many of the same reactions under far milder conditions, but asking manufacturers to abandon that infrastructure would hinder widespread adoption,” Holly Reeve, PhD, CEO and co-founder of HydRegen, said in a press statement. HydRegen’s biocatalyst platforms fit existing equipment and processes, allowing manufacturers to switch catalysts without changing factories and make production less expensive and more sustainable at scale.
Category: Chemicals & Materials
