TechBio Founders #7: Solving the plastic waste crisis by closing the recycling loop using enzymatic degradation with Andrii Shekhirev, CEO Enzymity

Enzymity is a bioplatform developing a method for breaking down polymers such as plastics and resins into monomers with the help of synthetic enzymes. The enzymes are tailored for specific types of material (e.g. PET or synthetic rubber) and are produced by genetically modified microorganisms. The monomers which result from the process can be used to create new virgin polymers, thus reducing the need for fossil fuel derived plastics/resins. This cycle can be repeated many times and does not deteriorate the quality of the material, as opposed to the currently prevalent mechanical recycling.

Loretta TIOIELA: Welcome! This is a new episode of our TechBio Founders Series by Next Sequence, and we are happy to welcome Andrii Shekhirev, CEO of Enzymity today. Hi, Andrii, how are you doing?

Andrii / Enzymity: Hello! Alright, Thank you for having me.I'm really excited to have this conversation with you.I'm all right, thank you. Was a bit sick from all of the celebrations. all the New Year celebrations. But now i'm back on track and go over from the holidays, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, big plans for 23. So there's no time to be sick.

Loretta TIOIELA: Yeah, no worries. I was pretty much going through that, you know, taping off the holiday mood and going back to the let's get going for 2023 mood this week. So I totally get you on this. So let's get going with business then. So you are the CEO of Enzymity. We will discuss a little bit more afterward about what is in Enzymity, and what is your core product. But I was digging a little bit on your profile, and i was really really intrigued. So tell me a little bit more about you what you've been studying, where you have been working, and tell us how you went from that to becoming the CEO of Enymity

Andrii / Enzymity: All right. Sure It's interesting to hear from time to time, that somebody has been researching up on me.I will. I will say that you could say that i'm a failed biochemist, in a sense that I was really into biology when I was starting in secondary school some 20 years ago, and I was doing all kinds of competitions in the Olympics nationwide, and was really excited about this, and was planning to go study biology or chemistry at the university, probably, but then at the last moment I got into a business school in Riga, and so I went for the business track, because at that moment I was convinced that that's cool for some reason.and I did finish that, and I was doing some startups work, some projects of my own for a number of years mostly because that was kind of the fashion these days, and that was easy back then. So we didn't have to build worldwide products to actually, you know, get easy traction and other things.But then about 5-8 years ago I started crawling back into the bio space because I never left the passion, so I've always been curious about this layer of the universe, the complexity on top of the ordinary chemistry, the dead world. And I think it's a it's not just a niche. It's not equitable to other niches in what's called deep tech. I think it's an entire layer of reality, so we need to treat it like that, and it can really affect most of the things that we are doing in the future, and is already doing that now. So that's why i'm back in biotech, and I think probably for good and it was a result of a number of perturbations and pivots. There were some ideas being discussed with myself and people who thought the same about biology.We were thinking about the recombinant synthesis of proteins for food so kind of molecular farming. We were thinking about health care applications, but it happens so that after a couple of changes we settled on the mission to help improve the circularity of the material economy. And specifically because that's one of the few problems that's not being talked about too much, at least, if you compare it with, let's say, with the climate change, with with all the carbon things. So we really think that you change waste is has always been it. It has never been labyrinth. So it's kind of it's not cool. But I think that also makes it really attractive as an area where as an area to focus on because there is less competition, and because there's a huge impact on it. You're connecting these 2 jointed parts of the global economy. And if you manage to do that in the end. I think the rewards both for the environment and for those people who do that might be quite dramatic.

Loretta TIOIELA: so originally crazy about biology that went through a dark side, a period by going to business school, and then went back to biology and building a biotech platform. And the way I understand it is about your platform for a plastic circularity. So can you tell us a bit about what problem, particularly in plastic circularity you're trying to tackle And why is this, you know ,the 1 billion dollar startup idea and why it's important. And why, right now, more than ever, of course we all know about our climate change and the need for us to stay away from fossil fuel, and of course, one of the main, I would say, by product of fossil fuel, that is, you know plastic. It's used in our day to day at so many level. We have plastic everywhere. Any food that we're having most of the time is, you know, wrapped around with plastic every item. Most of the item that we are buying actually either entirely plastic base, or at least a certain amount of plastic in it. So we even add it into your own blood, It is so very invasive, so solving a plastic, and our dependence is very important. And so how do you do that? And what was the original idea.

Andrii / Enzymity: if we look at it broadly, I think that we can safely say plastics is the platform of the century. Again, I'm using the word platform here more as a buzzword than than an actual thing. But it's kind of the foundation of the material economy of the twentieth century and it was all, thanks to the the fossil fuel proliferation.So there there was a very interesting analysis regarding how the world economy progresses and it looked at the development stages in terms of the key energy, resource and the key material resource, and they are usually interconnected So in the especially in the second half of the twentieth century there was oil and plastics, oil, flash, gas, and plastics. So you get plastics from fossil fuels, and you can use it in a in different ways and you can also use for energy. So, though those were the 2 things that kind of helped the company grow, and I don't think that it's worth demonizing plastic as much as we do fossil fuels, and I think that I mean fossil fuels are less elegant than plastic in this respect, because you need to actually take something out of the ground on mass, and and then spend it to get energy which I think in several 100 year time your sign would be to look really weird for our descendants, and you cannot really make that circular. You cannot really. You still need to dig out things from the ground.And yes, I know that you still need to dig out, you know and trouble for the for the green economy. But that's in comparable terms of the quantities and the impact and the atmospheric, especially. They have so many applications, and they allow us to save so much emissions because of their properties, like being lights, like being, you know, like having specific, they might be permitted. You'll see properties, etc. We just don't know how to handle them well at the end of their life.So right now, about 9% of the classic waste is being properly recycled in the world in Europe. That's around the 15%. I think that was the last number which is still really really embarrassing. I think if you look at it from this perspective from the 20 s century. 20 s century advantage point that would be really crazy like you wasted 85 of whatever you are like your foundation of your material economy. You're just kind of throwing it away or burning it, which is even worse, I think, because it goes straight into the atmosphere.

So our key, our core approach is that plastic is not bad per se. We just need to be able to handle it better.We just need to make it reusable, like, you know, like metals and other things that are easily returned and there are a number of ways to do that.So what we're doing is basically expanding how plastics can be made circular, and of course, we don't have the rosy glasses, in the sense that thinking that our solution, or you know, enzymatic recycling in general, is going to be the killer of the plastic recycling economy. But I think it has good chances to be one of the biggest types of recycling going forward and I can explain why so before I do that I just want to say that there still needs to be. But we still need all of the pieces of the puzzle we still need to reduce our plastic use. We need to design products around plastic. We need to get a better systems in place to collect sort and dispose of plastic, of course but given the share amount of plastic that's being producedit's around 300, something 1 million tons per year, that is a lot, and you cannot really fight that with just one weapon. So you need a number of measures to do that and no no one thing is going to solve the plastic crisis which it is. It is a crisis.Given the numbers, you know, the figures of the feedback but there is definitely a niche for technologies that allow converting various types of plastic into the chemicals they are made from and then enabling, using those chemicals to pay new plastic without involving fossil fuels, so you can call it. The big niches is chemical recycling, so that's an ethical. Second, I consider chemical recycling as well. It's just that the chemicals are complex or molecules instead of something simpler.But the reasoning is the same. So we do have, like the traditional recycling, mechanical recycling, which is good at what it does. But its scope is really limited, so I really doubt that it's possible in practice to sort and kind of clean 100% of our plastic who packaging that's been covered in breeze and all kinds of, you know, plastic parts that are just inseparable, even if you just take one industry which is not usually brought up in conversations about like the car manufacturing. Each car contains a huge amount of plastic details and nobody, really, you know, make the effort of disassembling a car at the end of this life. So what's usually being done is that the metal parts, the big parts like in bulk of the car, that can be easily recovered, and it's metallic, so we can just meld it down below the rest of the parts of which there are thousands. They are just kind of ground into a powder which is called car fluff, which is one of my favorite terms in circularity and like a dozen different types of plastic, together with other materials. So you can't really do much with it. Apart from just burning it and and making ash which is really a shape so that's like the lowest possible value, added application that you can hink about apart from just like digging into the ground, putting it into the ground.So there needs to be a way to separate classic from other types of things that we throw out, including big things like cars. Imagine based on the number of cars around the world that are being dumped every year. How much, even just that plastic flop ends up, being either burned or buried somewhere. So it's not just bad for the environment. It's also just kind of feel bad. So what we're aiming at is creating a a technology - and bringing it to the market- that helps treating the types of plastic ways which are currently untreatable, either because of the economy like it's just too expensive, like with the car flop. It's just too expensive to disassemble the card. By how you need to do it by hand. This or is just not possible like for some of the plastics. You just can't do that.And a lot of types of plastics that are not recyclable with mechanical recycling at all.So we think that there's a huge gap in the market, and we are one of the teams that are trying to fill it. There are a number of awesome startups around the world doing pretty much the same thing. What we are focusing on is not one specific as a meaning, not one specific enzyme for targeting one type of those plastic, we rather kind of taking a step back and working on a set of tools and methods that would allow us to quickly to design your enzyme iterations for a number of different plastic types enabling us to create a portfolio for different types of plastic. So there are major types of plastics, and then a lot of niche plastics. So until we have means to deal with most of them. Chemical recycling will remain in niche, I think, but once we have the capability of separating out, you know, in a targeted way, just those types of plastic, I think there's going to be a proliferation of this technology and I would expect it to become the major part of the classical recycle market.

Loretta TIOIELA: Yeah, you said it right, I think you basically covered all of the main issues when it comes to recycling for plastic, as I want to say, and I can tell you that getting away from plastic is something that is very hard to do. When I had my son and I had to replace every little plastic toys by just wooden toys, I realized how much it was actually present in our day to day life and if you go beyond that, and you look at everything that you're using on the day to day, everything is pretty much plastic now.The issue is plastic is so prevalent because of the different feature that it present. As you said, it's light. It's transparent, and I can tell you, like trying to have transparent things that are not plastic, physically you're going to use glass. But then again it's heavy. So, having something that is light,transparent,and not heavy, it's not that easy to come by, and actually plastic is pretty much the only way to go more or less, and at least something that is available to you as a consumer.

Andrii / Enzymity: and it’s really cheap. So I have this weird mental exercise where I like to imagine a medieval person are getting their hands on some item from today, things which are probably really cheap, like, you know, a passing bottle which would be magic for them. That would be just amazing. It weighs almost nothing. It doesn't let anything out or in it's transparent, and you can like you can also melt it down. So it's kind of it's malleable. So it's just it's amazing. And you can, you can, you know, go on with those examples as long as you want.So yeah, I think it's not the problem, it's not the plastic. The problem is the way we handle it at the end of this life. And by saying that i'm not saying that we don't beat like organic based plastics or plastics that are biodegradable, we do need that as well. But until that thing scales to free for 400 billions tons per year, we need other solutions as well, because I mean we only have that much space, and it's quickly, being filled up with plastic waste.

Loretta TIOIELA: It's exactly that because of the last past 10 years of working in tech and working with different startup. I've seen my share load of biodegradable startups trying to tackle that problem. And I think one of the things that you said that really strike me is the operational cost, the capability to actually produce and the capability to scale. Now, I think you're perfectly right in thinking and trying to approach this problem of circularity in a different way. Where the idea is not to say, okay, we're going to produce a material that is basically going to replace the already existing plastic. We're just going to tackle one angle that we think is actually faulty, which is the end of the cycle. And actually it's not a cycle. That's what you're saying. It's just in line, because you just go from extracting that oil and gas, and then going through all the chemicals chemical process that is going to produce that new plastic.But then, again, you just put it into manufacturing. The manufacturer is going to produce whatever product it's actually expected from the consumer perspective, the consumer use it. But then, again, I would say a couple of decades of us being used to throwing away anything instead of we using or trying to repair, we end up with you know waste out there. What I really like is the idea of saying. Okay, this is not a loop. Let's try to make it a loop. Let's try to make it a loop by basically saying, okay, that plastic, we can take it.And instead of trying to recycle it in a mechanical way. We have now new tools, this bio tools that we can use, and we can actually use microorganism. Use this enzyme, that kind of biodegrade this plastic to just we turn it back to it's manufacturing settings. So basically, yeah, we just like we stating the plastic polymers back to manufacturing level, so that the same plastic can be used again and again, and that in itself is very beautiful because it's it was not a cycle. And suddenly you're turning something that we call cycle the recycling cycle. We turn it into a real cycle because we are using what have been produced. It's not as if we had to dig things out again. So there is this virtual cycle that is actually very interesting. So with that in mind, how did you kind of try to figure out the size of this market? And how did you decide to then move on into turning that idea into a great product? How did you build your team? How did you guys managed to move away from, Okay, we know this is what we need to do to now let's do it?How do we do this?

Andrii / Enzymity: That's a big and most basic question.Before I go into details, one thing that I think is worth mentioning is that we're not really trying to compete with or take market share from mechanical recycling. So we think there should be more of it actually is right now it's just a small percentage. So of most of the classic handling.the the majority is being consideration and landfilling. So we are not confusing with mechanical. We we want to create methods that allow us to cycle the rest of the waste which is smoking time for recyclable.So we don't think that it's worth developing new technologies for things like, you know, Clean sort of plastic bottles. It's it's really works really well with mechanical recycling. I've spoken with a number of people who manage plus and recycling plans, and it's just so efficient. You kind of really.you know it. It's really difficult to to think about how that could be pushed further. So we are working on kind of the rest of the model, the the dark plastic, so to speak. If if you consider that like in in the universe.only a small percentage of the stuff is the the the matter that we consist of which we can see, and the rest is is something else is the dark matter and dark energy. So most of the plastic is dark classic. It just kind of we get rid of it and forget about it.So we don't want to forget about it. We want to turn into something that can be used again. Theoretically also unlimited number of times, because.unlike mechanical recycling. This process doesn't really degrade the the quality of the plastic, because it's a chemical decomposition, and more mechanical.So with that in mind.Another thing worth mentioning is that's this idea. While the by elegance, I think, has a lot of it falls. So there are a huge number of challenges I had still for this market. Otherwise I think everybody will be using it as a nice recycling already, because it's just it makes a lot of sense in so many ways.and the biggest challenge is for sufficiency relating to the cost of the process. So it's either really expensive for really slow for both.And that's exactly what we are working, Both we're focusing on we, we're trying to solve the problem of kind of industrial process.So what we're doing is essentially developing tools, and others that help improve the an engineer, the the natural recurring enzymes of which there's been there. There has been a number of enzymes that were discovered in the wild, so to speak, that that we're that evolved naturally to to target the plastic as a carbon source for certain organizes. So those are good starting point, low hanging food. You can engineer them to to make them more stable, to make them faster and basically more suitable for industrial conditions.the next generating completely novel enzymes, especially for tackling the the types of classic that traditionally have you or no research regarding that that process.You know those process, I mean as a master recycling, or in improving further on the ones that do so. As a starting point, we we.the

we were toying with a sort of quote called Traditional ways of of enzyme engineering like a directed evolution, rational design. And we see Well, aside goes by. We're shifting more and more works computational methods. Firstly, because we think that there this is where most of the potential lies. You can only do so much in the physical world when when it when it comes to huge. You know, combinatorial spaces of of proteins, I think, is just a necessity to do things in compute.and secondly, of course, because it's getting more and more advanced by the month. So this market, this kind of this part is just exploding, not only in in biote, but anywhere. I think it's something worth mentioning. All the all the cool stuff that has come up out of the of the corporations in the last couple of years. So all of this, and and is getting cheaper itself, so all of this makes makes it possible to do things even in small teams that that were not really even thinkable like 5 or 10 years ago. So when you also coupled up with the like thatthe the the the foundational biotech methods, like you know, Gene synthesis and and related stuff, are also still getting cheaper and cheaper and more accessible, I think now is the the high time.Now is the best time to to experiment in this space and to develop products that actually have impact.And that's yeah, that's exactly. That's exactly what we're doing.

Loretta TIOIELA: Yeah, the value And that was originally what totally seduced me. As you know, our computing foundation is entirely dedicated to trying to bring Clown AI quantum computing to singular biology. And so, when it was counting for startups, definitely founding in the Madrid, was really the highlight of my day. Definitely. I remember again when I found you guys, I was like, okay, this is exactly these guys understand where i'm going, and it's all about bringing together technology as a way to move forward. They are in this cycle much, much faster than it is, because at the end of the day. What I see within zoom is the positioning where you got this idea where you say, okay, we have an issue with the plastic, and we're going to use enzyme actually to degrade it, because, instead of a linear a linear approach, we really want to bring that a loop back phase where plastic can be we use again. So how do we do that? We are going to use enzyme? How do we do? How can we produce enzyme in a very scalable way where first we have to produce different kind of insight, to do the great different kind of plastic you use a term that I love, which is the doc matter of all the Doc plastic. It's exactly that. And I think this is a critical issue, because we don't know what we don't know. And the thing is of all this thing that we are not actually recycling. The reason why we are not the cycling mate is because we have no idea how to recycle it. Besides, the actual mechanical, recycling method, and so having an ability to say, okay, what if even if we don't know right now, is there any enzyme we could search for? We could search for some enzyme that potentially could help us degrade this particular set of plastic, and suddenly become very interesting because you move away from the experimental base in vitro approach in optimization. And and and I creation to a pure, in cynical, pure computer based approach, and that changes everything. Because suddenly, instead of looking at millions in R&D to be able to do in vitro testing, and maybe potentially find one enzyme that will work for one very limited use case. Suddenly your platform would be able to say, okay, whatever the use case, at least meant to be thrown at us. We can. We can look for that because we are using using machine learning and with our with our algorithm we are able to basically say, okay.the through a different round of testing we are learning about these

plastics and all the chemicals use. And we can predict potentially that this confirmation of enzyme might potentially be working. And so we're moving away from the 8 to 10 years research that we'll use millions hundreds of millions potentially, in how they, how in the funding to, maybe looking at a 3 to 5 years.are in the process potentially even shorter. If the team is actually able to move forward with the data, so suddenly it become not just. It's relative. It becomes data centric. It becomes predictive. It becomes exactly what we've seen. In computing it's a jump ahead. And so I like the idea of using machine learning here to basically produce enzyme and then using this enzyme to tackle one specific problem in your case, which is. how do we fix the broken loop in sustainability for plastic? And so I was it to build that that modeling team. How many of you guys are working at in?

Andrii / Enzymity: So before I go into that, just a couple of things I want to a couple of comments on on what you just said. So I think you you're making it sound really cool, which is great, which I think it is. Well, it at least it seems to me that it's it's not as awesome as as all people wanted to be, at least, yet there are a lot of challenges to this approach, and some great results are yet to be seen in in most sectors. So basically, that's a very similar approach as to what is being done in in in health care right now in drug discovery.and you can you can. You can claim that there are some success stories, but compared with the volume of preference is still just the early days. And so we are trying to transplant this model of thinking into other industries for us as the

industrial biotech and and specifically focusing on on on circular materials.But, as you rightly very rightly mentioned, the the beauty of the computational methods is that they get easier and better with time.while the individual, the classical individual methods get more more difficult with time because it's it's one thing to you know, Just run a directed evolution experiment with a 100 different variants. That's totally easy these days. But you know, when you have a specific enzyme, and you explore all the kind of those little patches of ofance around the active site. You are basically collecting all the low hang inputs. And then you need to go further and Suddenly your space of possibility starts expanding at a huge temple.and it becomes really difficult to move forward, whereas in in in in the in silicon methods, the more data you like, the easier it actually gets. We need to looking for because you are improving your models and your mapping this this landscape better. So I think. Yeah, I I would totally like subscribe off under everything that you've said.The one of the challenges, I think, is still kind of marrying this with with the with, with with SIM bio, so it's not like. Those 2 things are are quite as integrated as we would like them to be. At this point we're getting there. So there are a lot of wonderful startups for working on this.but for now our team is is mostly based on on biotech experience. So we don't have like pure.let's say, machine learning people in our team yet who would come, you know, from from a completely tech digital background and nothing else.I think this year we'll have one or 2, so it's it. It will be really interesting to integrate a team with both biologists and and people from the digital cortical background, because those are 2 completely different thinking parents and different ways of doing things, of scaling things and looking at. You know all kinds of stuff like from from money to teamwork.None of them bad are good, just very different. So if you, if you manage to take the good from from the both worlds. I I think the result might be amazing, and it will allow to to scale by it for the in an excellent way, and not in this laborious. Your rooms law pattern, where each next step is becoming more and more difficult. You know it's like trudging in a in a in a sea of honey. It's like the more the the further you go, the deeper you get into the honey, and the more tired you get so it's it's an ordeal. I think it's also possible to like. Get a helicopter or motor bolt or something. So my bet is that when the merger of digital and and bio is complete.or at least kind of it matures as a as the technology.amazing things are are gonna be possible.So our team is is for now this is a combination of of kind of the business expertise and biotech expertise. We're going to add fewer digital expertise as well.and of course, some sustainability and security expertise, because this market especially is still it. We You need to deal quite heavily with with all sorts of regulations, and not only say i'm saying only about the waste, freedom of market, but also about the plastics market. So in in most countries you need to consider a lot of things which are not related to the technology or the pure kind of monetary side, and these are both positive and negative. So, having that, know how the team, I think, is essential for any start with zoom with with the circle, it or with classic, or especially in in in the case of the So we're still a small team we're based in in Riga in I Wonderful country of Latvia, up north and near the at the coast of the Bolt City. So we consider Europe as our kind of home home market both. We're building a global company from the start, not least because the plastic industry is extremely globalized. So there are just a few huge players that produce plastic in big enough volumes in the world.So it's really consolidated. So if you and you can't really do anything without, if you want to close the loop, you need to involve both ends. So you need to all the recyclers or become one, and needs in both classic producers. So we're not definitely. We're definitely no planning to become a plastic producer, so we need to have them on board and they are big international company. So we're building for scale from the start. We've been speaking with the quite a few marketplace over the world from from, you know in Europe, of course, but also in the Us.In Japan, South, East Asia, and and other parts of the world primarily to make sure that what we are building is something that somebody wants. So I do believe that you know deep tech as a whole can only win from the lean approaches that are very, very common in digital startups. So you can. When you don't have the technology with you can first go and sell your product, holding calls or showing to people in a demo or something, and you can get the feedback, and then you build, and then you decide if you need to build that or something else.So none of the if if we build it, will they come? You can actually first like, sell it and then build it, which is amazing, which is, you know what mature markets mature industries are. This is how i'm sure this is working in in the tech you are forced to first demonstrate technology, and then kind of. We still need to bear the risk of scaling it, which is a different piece. If you're building an app and scaling, it is super easy. So there a lot of services that are eager to help you scale it from one user to a 1 million users so beyond or bill it user to me, Billy, you billing users what it doesn't really work like that in in anything that's involves that involves atoms.at least at this point. So I think it still pays to interact and try to interface with the industry as much as possible as early as possible being honest about the state of your technology.but also looking at the reaction and gathering feedback. And you know, if if your technology is something that that people or organizations want. Then they will be happy to support you, or they will be happy to wait. If you are not on the level at the level which they would be kind of consider a start for corporation.So that's a good. That's what we've been doing for more than a year now as well, in parallel to building the platform.

Loretta TIOIELA: I think I think they have the right approach. I I I like because you're being very amble. True, you Don't, have yet the fully computerized ideal, you know, are going algorithm that is going to crush and and produce enzyme at will, based on the different plastic that we present to it. But so far as you mentioned, you guys very quickly based on these, I would say, computer oriented, that Oriented approach managed to identify a couple of enzyme already among them you have PET, for example, or P. You or so you, those in itself more than maybe ped or PE, which might not be speaking very quick, quickly or easily to the general public. It's something that everyone is more or less at about and silly. This is is everywhere. So it's it's kind of a even with these 3 different enzyme Already I would tend to say in terms of that it's already a huge market out there that your company could actually address, and you already have enough capabilities in terms of okay. This is the market that it represented. We're trying to solve the issue for this market, even with one enzyme, typically PET enzyme and zoomatic recycling for that and using that actually is representing a market of 2027,000,000,000So it's not nothing. And again, I understand You're being very emble, because you're still a lot of.But that's a lot of something that was actually my phone. That's a lot of something already.

And what was very surprising to me, you mentioned yeah, you already in discussion with different type of partners, and it was very funny to see actually coming into the play. Of course, as you said, chemical producer. And because you said it perfectly. We're not trying to be a chemical producer ourselves. So we need to work in partnership with them and among them you have.And so, yeah, they? They are you, Jack, the first one out there. They are others, and you guys actually getting in touch. But I think that what really like kind of, you know, like really managed to grab my attention was the fact that you had also, like customer, oriented, firm like fashion industry players. There is H. And M. Or even cosmetic products, players like loyal, you know, coming in into the play and interested. And if you really think about it.

it, it it points back to what you were saying earlier about plastic. We don't realize it. But actually the usage of plastic is everywhere.So when we are thinking about plastic most of the time we're thinking about the actual food industry, the wrapping, packaging everything that we're buying. We're not singing so much about clothing. We're not so much thinking about all the different area where potentially classic is actually used in this as a secondary element that we're not even seeing. And so that for me was kind of okay, you guys, I've already identified 3 major enzyme. You can use it already for this, each, even for each one of these 3 enzyme. You already have Massive Mac Market actually share. That is up right there. Grab me for the taking.and so is that without even adding on the Q. Ml. Computer. You know, a predictive modeling part of of the product. And I thought, okay, that's for me. It's very compelling. I've already proposition because you could already say, okay, these guys just need to get going. But as soon as you're going to be started to actually operate this with the data, as you were saying, the the the ability to create and address more and more enzyme and address motive for kind of plastic. It's a massive, so I think this is the reason why so many of us now investors actually very looking at you very intently, and that's the reason why I think also that you were featured on slash, so tell us a little bit more about going to slash 2,022 Very interesting because slash is by far one of the biggest event, most important tech event in Europe. It's a very nice one.We have Web Summit in the South, near Portugal, but slush being in the know him, the Baltics. It's totally different because it gives life. It gives light. It brings the eyeball of everyone in the region on what's happening in this area, and being an investor, a business friend, but investing globally, you can say that that's not something that you do. Naturally so I was slash. I was your experience, and what did it breathing to you so far?

Andrii / Enzymity: So I think i'm gonna follow my already established button and and say a couple of words. Come on a couple of things before going on about slush.So once more I and it's really nice to you that you are the way you are putting it. But of course there's still number of challenges need to be overcome, and the the level of of maturity of the specific enzymes is not being formed, so some of them are closer to kind of being scalable, and the ones that we're working on some of them are still very, very early prototype stage. So we are working on a on a several months at the same time.just to make sure that this is transferable to other things and cellulose that you mentioned is really sort of a wild cub there, so it's not a it's not the plastic right? So it's a natural polymer that is one of the many parts of wood, and we it's not that we are also looking at repurposing all all the forestry and agricultural waste in the world right now.But this is something that we keep in mind as we work on the There's plastic is not the only to you that that needs to be need more kind of much, much, much closer to nature. Golden Poke. Yeah, you know, fruits and vegetables they still need behind huge months of waste that that usually gets just incinerated because you can't really dump it anywhere. There's just too much of it. You need to burn it, and it's Still.even if you discount the fact that it's kind of again being really just wasteful with the resources that you have. It also contributes a lot to the to the emissions profile of humanity, so to speak.So we are targeting plastics, but we are also thinking. Beyond that there are a number of other materials that could be made more circular, using enzymes. So in the future.Wow, that's a bad price. But yeah, in the future I think that my vision would be that a lot of the waste, especially municipal ways. could be process and transform using something that's very similar conceptually to stomachs so, or digestive systems. So we as omnivorous mammals. It's a lot of different stuff. We just shove it in, and then we hope that our stomachs take care of, and they most of the time they do so. These are amazing machines that turn all sorts of various things into just a very small number of, you know, nutrients for our bodies. So I think something similar ispossible going forward for the global recycling economy, having, you know having a an infrastructure of digesters. If you wish that could disassemble most of the things that are home in in in on sort of waste, including plastics, of course, because it's a big part of the of the ways, but not the only one by far. and that's still far ahead. But this is something that we and we like to talk about it as our kind of long term guiding start. So so having most of the things that are degradable by enzymes to be degraded by and in the future so, but coming currently back to slide from this very

So this last year was the was our second time. It's much, and it's it wasn't something

Andrii / Enzymity: spectacular in terms of of like being featured somewhere or winning anything. So usually the the startup pitch competitions that that occur on tech conferences are won by, you know apps which have huge structure one year after being on that. So it's for deep fixed startups is is changing slowly, but at least I haven't seen a single new tech startup winning such a competition yet. So I think it's just possible to to compete on the same terms. Maybe it has happened this year i'm in this year 2022 tech crunch at this, wrapped in San Francisco was actually one by deep tech sort of, and I was in San Francisco at that time I going to tech Orange. And this was for me, you know, kind of haha moment, because I was putting so comforted into the TV that Yes, find any deep that is coming, and it's the value area. And we are coming. And so, yeah, for the first time, actually the tech from the crunch. This rep was actually one by a Did that start up? So you know, for me it's kind of a signal, and over the years, you know they've been infinity into 2. I think it was kind of a pivot moment with Alpha Fold, and you know all the mainstream media starting to realize what was happening in value through the work done by deep mine.They have been so many a press release and an article we don't about that it is brought to light, I think, in a certain way, to the general people like that we were getting closer, and it was to to being able to almost as machine learning, being able to design settings and have predictive model of proteins. Of course, I mean the field of spreading design itself. It's so complex. You have so many limited, and it's sell the structure of the protein itself. It's not so much knowing about the gene. That is something that we have done like a couple of years ago. That is past. It's not about the gene. It's about the conformation. So.working on this and trying to see big tech companies tackling this kind of issue, and then successfully demonstrating, you know, significant successes.I think, 2,022 was definitely a pivot and tech crunch clearly by, you know, making a deep tech start up actually. Wayne over. You know the classical sass web app, you know. Start up that there. So for me. It's like kind of a very big moment, you know. And then again that that same week, you know, I was there, and it it felt like everything was kind of converging within that week. Ycl. This first Yc. By your summit.which was very again a surprising and amazing at the same time, of course, the cohort such. Y see, I've been grown a tremendously over the last couple of years, specifically during the Covid area, because they were accepting, you know remote applications.Obviously they were going to be more bio, but that not necessarily meant that they were going to see by you as significantly more important. But actually it is. And they they all that for a separate tract of Yc. By your summit. And it was kind of a small event they didn't really advertise much about it and many players in industry. We're not even aware that it was happening, you know, same week as tech courts. So everyone was looking at tech range and not, you know, caring about, and not even knowing that just right there, you know, to blocks away. It was actually the Yc. By the summit.and so I was very lucky. I felt very lucky to be able to to reach out to these events and see it happening, but I think it's. It's really like only the beginning, because I can see, for example, this week alone, Z. Again publishing you by your podcast, and it was really about the you know, coming of Ml: the coming of AI in in Bio. And so, yeah.you you get when you start getting this kind of signal coming from strong players. You know that things are actually moving finally in the right direction. So yeah, so maybe not, maybe not on the big scene yet. But yet again, you know, we we have a big, you know, deep tech conferences. Hello! Tomorrow. I've been a huge fan of them for many, many years now, and they've been kind of, you know, that lighthouse in in Europe about deep tech.and so you can see that definitely. You know, deep tech in Europe has always been part of the DNA. It's just now. How do we make it happen? Because this thing that in Europe there is a strong problem. We have huge talent, like we have kind of excellence at the University level. But then, again, when you, the these talents start startups and they trying to scale it. It's the scale of part that goes wrong, you know, most of the time, and it's not a matter of not having the right team. Most of the teams are amazing. I think there's a couple of problematic tackle needs to be tackled first.I mean it works for bio, but it works and it worked again for all the different kind of sovereign technology that we've been trying to fight for over the last couple of years.

Loretta TIOIELA: I'm. Coming from cloud computing. I'm. Coming from AI,and I've known for many, many years the issue of digital sovereignty in cloud in in Europe, and how difficult it is. But the reality is, it's very hard to imagine that it's going to be a European Cloud Service provider that is going to be able to be at the same scale as the actual players, because our market is to fragmented, and we have a fragmentation problem. We Don't have that full unified market. If our market was fully unified. We will have the same size as a typical, you know, North America, American market, and that would be fine enough, I know Startup would be able to. Actually that that market is one unique market, and, you know, sell in every country without regulation, because one of the things you said is. Yeah, it's not just about the tech. There is also many, many elements, because we are one piece in an entire ecosystem. We need to talk to a customer. We need to talk to people before us down the line, the producers we need to integrate with them. So there is a lot of work, but there is also the Regulators. And so I think.if we want biotech deep tech in general to really blow some in Europe because we have the mean of it. I think it's also going to need to be, I would say, a government effort, not just at the national level, but also at the fully your parent level. So that's why I was saying, okay, I can change the I would say Government level orientation or strategic orientation. But I can look and and try to influence and and and be part of what's happening on the on the other side of the ecosystem, and for that there is all the investors. But there is also all the tech events like slush that are breeding live. So that's why I was asking you I was slush for you guys.But I think the question we leave behind was, okay. What's next? So what are you working on? Because definitely 2022 fast? Like? Okay, industrial partnership kind of finding your footing in between continuing the work on the engineering. But at the same time it's a product. It's not a research project so trying to make that product by also bringing on first customers and in partners to to to the table but 2023. It feels like, okay, what what's next for you guys in terms of next steps.So it it will. I will really. I'm really curious to prepare slush with Hello tomorrow. So this year is going to be my first time at that specific event. we got into the deep tech. It's like 5 years cohort or community lately so definitely gonna attend this year's Paris Conference.This is this is just something. This is just one of the nice parts of the more kind of hands on and challenging things that we are looking to do during the year is start working on scaling specific use cases with specific partners. So we do have call it the funnel. So so a number of of companies are interested to to work with us for bringing this to the market, and we think that working without such a partner would be unwise in in in the case of a very fresh. And so we need to support of of big players, both technical, not necessarily the financial, technical, and kind of informational or conceptual support. So we need to understand that what the the process that we're building is useful for them, that it's pluggable into what they already have, or that they don't need to change much about what they're doing already to be able to use in zoomatic technology. So this year we're looking to kind of boost the first partnerships and start first use case scaling. So we we think that it's worth doing that with specific applications in mind you've mentioned, let's say, textiles that could be just as an example that could be one niche that that really could benefit from an automatic recycling. Firstly, because a lot of textile products are being discarded separately and those so it's kind of you can have them in bulk. Not mix with like things like fool and stuff like that, but also because it's really hard to deal with them. So the way it usually happens right now is Either it just gets burnt or dumped somewhere.or it goes. It gets sent into countries far, far away from the point of from the point where it was discarded, and people disassemble them by hand, moving all the like zippers. And but so that's attached to the textile And maybe we're using those So it's really labor intensive. It's not efficient, and it involves a lot of logistics. So that is potentially a very interesting application area for enzymatic recycling. So this is one of our main focal points.I've also mentioned automotive. So we've we've seen a lot of interest from from car manufacturers around the world in terms of being able to at least extract certain types of plastics from the from these those grounds cars the car flop.So there are a number of those niches where we think, as a magic recycling of plastic makes the most sensitive.So it doesn't make sense in most cases. But in some places it's it's really something that could, you know, transform the market, more create the market, because there is not, because all the plastic is just being discarded or burned.So this is where we're going to be, focusing our efforts as well as we, of course, continuing to work on on the platform. So if you're working on the platform. Your work is never done right. So you you there's always things you can improve and and build upon, and there's new data that you can incorporate, and there are new versions of enzymes even, for you know, the the good part about building a platform is that you can roll out new versions of existing enzymes as well. So, even if you have a a very efficient enzyme for a specific type of sake you can always upgrade it like a drop in in the same process that you've developed. So you can keep and releasing the new versions of the enzyme just like you. We some versions of like like you push updates to a software product. Basically I mean, it's definitely not completely the same. But conceptually it's it's like, quite, you know. Interestingly, that close.So we're going to be pushing those 2 balls.you know, with 2 with with 2 feet trying to both push forward the platform and also the commercialization part, and to be fair, we're not the first company that is in the enzymatic recycling space. And we're not the company. That's the first is ahead in terms of the commercial applications, but we feel that there is still, first of all, the the markets are huge.and second of all, there are still ways that this can be focused on which very few people are are working right now, especially, you know, approaching this from a platform perspective and trying to tackle the issue of mixed classic ways, not not trying to and he is mechanically second, but opening up the the rest of the plastic waste market.Yes, These are the the focal points and and growing the team going with him, as I mentioned, getting more like, you know, people with the digital backgrounds on board, because I think there are a number of skills that are really really useful for a team that consists mostly of of, you know, business people and and sciences.You know people who have already done some work on digital setups. They can bring a lot of interesting skills that can complement this. And I think overall that this is generally what is being observed. As far as I can judge, in the entire tech bio space, so kind of trying to bring together, the the the the digital background, the the kind of in vitro or or bio backgrounds, and also business commercial backgrounds, and combined them into something into dream teams that can actually perform much better than than any of the parts.And this is this is what we're kind of building right now.

Loretta TIOIELA: Amazing! I think this is the longest podcast that we have ever done, and I could go on and go on for much longer. But last final word. If people want to reach out to you. Do you have any email address account, and we are linking? How do people reach out to you?

Andrii / Enzymity: I'll say, this is where we would be to just drop us an email to hello@andzoomt.com that would be the fastest way, or just find me on Linkedin, or find the company. I think the name is still unique. So it should be quite easy.

Loretta TIOIELA: Yeah, it is. It is I can guarantee I've done a little bit of Google searching over the last couple of days just to make sure that it was ready for today's podcast. And yeah, and zoom is pretty unique right now. So, and I guess pretty anything in the future. I'm definitely waiting for you guys. Thank you. Thank you so much, Andrew, for this amazing podcast, and looking forward to see you guys scale in 2,023. Thank you.

Andrii / Enzymity: Thank you so much for the conversation, and for for inviting us.She is still the listeners and the wishing you a hugely energetic 2023.

Loretta TIOIELA: Yes, for sure. Thank you.

Andrii / Enzymity: Thank you.