Inside The Startup Reinventing America’s Trillion Dollar Chemical Industry

**Jared Friedman** (0:00)
This reactor in Houston, Texas, represents a whole new approach to chemical manufacturing.

**Gaurab Chakrabarti** (0:05)
We make chemicals in a completely new way. We started off by making hydrogen peroxide. Now we sell products for water treatment, national defense, infrastructure, agriculture, you name it, we make a chemical for it.

**Jared Friedman** (0:16)
The story of Solugen is as scrappy as it gets. It all started with this prototype, built out of PVC pipes the founders bought from Home Depot.

**Sean Hunt** (0:25)
In its heyday, this did 12,000 bucks a month in revenue.

**Jared Friedman** (0:28)
Fast forward to now, Solugen is a billion dollar company shipping out tanker trucks of products that power critical US industries. So how did they go from this single beaker of hydrogen peroxide to this full-scale manufacturing plant? I visited Solugen HQ in Houston, Texas to find out. What do you guys do here? What is Solugen?

**Gaurab Chakrabarti** (1:02)
We use biology to create chemicals that allow us to create smaller chemical plants and have a cleaner, safer, more environmentally friendly footprint. We've invented a process called chemie-enzymatic processing where we take the specificity of biology by taking an enzyme and pairing it with a metal catalyst, which is what's traditionally used in industry. What we've done with these is by marrying these two, you can actually create more efficient reactions. So instead of having a 60% yield, you can have 96% yield, which is what we have at scale, precisely because of these two catalysts.

**Jared Friedman** (1:35)
Solugen is the first company to fuse biology and chemistry in this way, pulling enzymes from living cells, in this case, corn syrup, and pairing them with novel metal catalysts. The output is chemicals that can be used in everything from agriculture to skincare. Traditionally, chemical plants relied on fossil fuel feedstock, which has led to all kinds of unintended consequences. This new approach is cleaner, safer, and more efficient.

**Sean Hunt** (2:00)
We receive rail cars of corn syrup, and then we run our utility system. We change the parameters of the plant, the way that the enzymes are reacting, the way that the metal catalysts are reacting, to oxidize the corn syrup how we want. And then at the end, we evaporate water. We take the final products, we store them in finished good tanks, or we send them to a blend farm to get blended with other chemicals, and that's the process.

**Jared Friedman** (2:22)
Solugen started with a true eureka moment, the kind of freak invention that normally happens only in science fiction. Sean was working in the chemicals industry, and Gaurab was in medical school studying pancreatic cancer.

**Sean Hunt** (2:34)
I was working on this Skunk Works project to try to do direct hydrogen peroxide synthesis, where you react hydrogen and oxygen gas directly together over metal catalyst. And then I was working on this project, and then Gaurab was like, oh yeah, I found this really crazy mechanism in pancreatic cancer, where it's like locally 50 percent hydrogen peroxide concentration. I was like, what? That's wild.

**Jared Friedman** (2:51)
It turned out that an obscure enzyme found in pancreatic cancer cells that Gaurab was studying was the key to a new process for making industrial hydrogen peroxide.

**Gaurab Chakrabarti** (3:01)
So these pancreatic cancer cells, they put out peroxide. Peroxide creates almost like an invisibility cloak around the pancreatic cancer that makes it difficult for immune cells to come in. It was like, that's a very interesting discovery, but why? And so once we asked the question why, we found out the reason was an enzyme. It was just a mutated enzyme that's found only in pancreatic cancer. And so that's when we said, what if the two worlds could collide, right? What if enzymes and metal catalysts could coexist?

**Jared Friedman** (3:30)
Here's how it works. Solugen feeds corn syrup to the enzymes, the same ones from the pancreatic cancer cells, which transform it into new compounds. They then use metal catalysts to further process those into the final chemicals that can be used to build all kinds of products we use in our everyday lives. In most chemical plants, the feedstock comes from oil and gas, which inevitably produces toxic byproducts. Solugen literally starts with sugar.

**Gaurab Chakrabarti** (3:56)
We have to suspend belief for a second. People believe that anything to do with biology and chemicals, it's just a bad mix because, oh, biology is too sensitive. It's going to break down, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we said, let's suspend that criticism for a second and just look at the numbers. And we say, if we can make the enzyme last this long on stream, and the product is this concentration, we can make a lot of money. And that's where we started.