BEING RIGHT ON TIME

The problem they’re tackling

In the midst of the climate crisis, carbon dioxide emissions are one of the biggest challenges faced by the world today. Whilst solutions like carbon capture have been developed to reduce the emissions reaching the atmosphere, we still need to be able to either store or utilise that carbon dioxide.

“The whole chemical industry uses more or less 260 million tonnes of CO₂ as a starting material to build all kinds of materials and chemicals… from those 260 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, 90% is used to produce urea. It's also used in oil recovery processes, which means the applications are rather short lived,” said Mauricio Murillo, Co-Founder of Eutechtics. “The problem we're facing is that we are only capable of consuming an amount of CO₂ that roughly equates to 0.6 - 0.7% of the annual anthropogenic emissions. We're not able to valorise even 1%.”

So came the opportunity for Eutechtics to “develop new chemistry, other than urea production, that would effectively use carbon dioxide to create molecules that we can use in our everyday lives.”

The technology they’re developing

Eutechtics have proposed a process utilising green solvents to use carbon dioxide as a C1 building block for organic chemistry, which will allow them to “utilise the CO₂ from carbon capture at the point of source and be in the middle, transforming this into value added product.”

“Instead of relying on petrochemical feedstocks, we are introducing CO₂ as an alternative source of carbon.”

Initially, based on extensive market research, our focus is on producing carboxylic acids for use in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and the food and drinks industries. This is desirable as it meets customer demands for environmentally friendly products. But the potential doesn’t stop at simple carboxylic acids, “With the technology that we are working on, we can enable reagents that are more functional group tolerant, which means that we can introduce amides and esters, and we can effectively produce a big set of different molecules for different applications within the chemical industry.”

The impact of their technology

Their technology has the potential to target decarbonisation in the chemical industries as it targets emissions in multiple ways. It reduces the amount of stoichiometric reagents originating from virgin petrochemicals, replaces volatile organic solvents with solvents that can be partially bio-derived, and it reduces energy requirements. By fine-tuning the solvent formulation, they can reduce the temperatures and pressurisation requirements and reduce the energy used by up to 80%.

The journey so far

Eutechtics’ journey is an interesting take on the deep tech chemistry journey. With the idea initially born in 2017 and Mauricio originally wanting to find funding and research this in his PhD, he ultimately pursued a PhD that came close to the subject and kept this eventual use in mind.

After meeting his co-Founder, Armando Leal, through the Mexican community at the University of York, they decided to pursue a shared passion in sustainability, and they have since skirted around a standard spin-out process, starting up without the backing of a university department.

Whilst they tried to collaborate with multiple universities and organisations in the United Kingdom, their customer value proposition involved maintaining ownership of their IP. So whilst they have had the advantage of maintaining 100% ownership of their IP, it has meant a struggle to obtain the facilities and funding to develop their technology without giving up their IP in exchange.

This has led to a slightly unique approach to their R&D, which flipped the normal commercialisation journey back-to-front. Whilst typically ventures develop their technology first, often whilst working in academic institutions, then look for potential uses and markets and spin out, Eutechtics did the market exploration first.

Making full use of their time without lab space, Mauricio and Armando spent a number of years instead working on their value proposition, talking to customers, and desk-researching the market and the chemistry and engineering needed to make it work.

This means they now can hit the ground running with a strong customer value proposition and the customer needs in mind throughout their technology development.

The investment deal

One of the biggest challenges Eutechtics has faced was getting the money to work on the idea. “We need to develop that technology from scratch, without university support, and it's like how do we do it?” said Armando. “It's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. You need funding to get a lab and develop the technology, but you need the technology already developed to prove it and get funding.”

As they started to develop the idea, they had a few options: get equity investment, find a university to support them, or secure a grant. “The first scenario, with investors,” said Armando, “of course they loved idea, but they wanted a more mature project.” They explored some opportunities with universities, but ultimately the fit wasn’t right due to their value proposition and desire to maintain their IP ownership.

“We broke away from the traditional innovation path our technology would normally follow, because that was exactly what the situation required.”

As they considered if the only option was to go to a university and go forwards as a spinout, they turned to grant funding. Aware of the competitiveness of the Smart Grant process, this application was viewed as a last resort. However, with the time they had been focussing on developing their value proposition, market opportunities and desk research, and a collaboration with the University of York, their application was strengthened and they secured the Smart Grant.

However, this came with the requirement for match funding, which needed to be secured within a short period after they heard the outcome. In this short deadline, they also needed to find a lab space and start the R&D. “You think the submission is the most stressful part… but then if you get granted, then you have two months to find the match funding.”

Enter Prosemino, a cleantech-focussed Venture Studio that enabled to them to tackle two birds with one stone. As well as match funding the grant, Prosemino provided them with access to a lab space kitted out with a host of chemistry-specific equipment to get them started, and staff to help them with ordering everything else. “If we didn't have that support, it would probably have been the end of the start-up project, and the team would have pursued more academically-orientated research."

The support from Change Makers

Eutechtics joined Change Makers during 2024 and, in that time, we’ve been able to offer them a range of support from guidance on securing their match funding to Venture Mentoring and expert guidance through our masterclass series. “We receive a lot of poor advice from people, who didn’t understand our struggles or where we come from and suggested investors with different scopes and expectations. We felt that once we spoke with the Change Makers investment expert, they had a background of what we needed and experience of what other start-ups like us have done to be able to recommend us a path to follow.”

They have particularly benefitted from the unique chemistry focus and expertise of the Change Makers team. “They have that knowledge of what it’s like to build a chemistry business, just understanding the operations, and it’s helped to build a stronger value proposition even from when we applied to the Smart Grants.”

“I believe, if we didn't have the interaction with the Royal Society of Chemistry, probably the way that we framed the Smart Grant application wouldn’t be the same.”

In addition they have received valuable support from the network of founders that have “been in our shoes and they’re in a later stage, it helps us to understand our struggles and how we can tackle them in the future.” This also extends to support from two dedicated Venture Mentors, “every time we speak to them it’s just tweaking our technology down more into what we want. To be honest, if we had other mentors in another random accelerator, it probably would not have been half the same resource. We get very targeted advice; like specific features certain carboxylic acids should have for a given industry application and how we can tailor our carboxylic acid to fit into these screens if we want to move into pharmaceuticals. It's very targeted.

“And to be honest, the backing of the Royal Society of Chemistry has been super useful for us, as a means to alleviate the lack of university support. We are no longer two random blokes trying to develop a technology; we are backed by the Change Makers programme, which does wonders."

The future

At the time of the interview, Eutechtics had just started work in Prosemino’s lab, but their excitement to get moving was palpable. “You've got to move really fast in a start-up, and of course we have ups and downs, like every start-up, but right now we're up and hopefully we can continue with that,” said Armando. “I'm just looking forward to getting back to the lab,” said Mauricio with a laugh, “It's the smell of ethyl acetate in the morning.”

Caption: The RSC (Alex Heaffey, far right) visits Eutechtics co-founders Mauricio Murillo (centre right) and Armando Leal (second right) at the Prosemino facility in London (Gyen Ming Angel, far left; Chris Howards, second left; Samia Said, centre left).