chemical-manufacturing
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The Garage-Born Chemical Company That Keeps the World’s Machines Moving
CRC Industries began with one corrosion inhibitor mixed in a Pennsylvania garage. More than six decades later, its real product is a carefully engineered answer to an expensive question: what keeps a machine working instead of waiting?
The $5.1 Billion Company Hiding in Plain Sight on 30 Million Cars
Axalta’s name is rarely visible, but its chemistry sits on millions of vehicles, factory parts and buildings. Now the coatings specialist is turning paint into a system of color data, robotics and manufacturing efficiency - just as a pending merger could redraw its market.
Shreyans Chopra
Shreyans Chopra is the founder and CEO of Mstack, an AI-native specialty chemicals company based in Houston that helps North American and global buyers source custom chemicals from a diversified manufacturing network. A chartered accountant turned BCG consultant turned Lightspeed India investor, he started Mstack in July 2022 and scaled it to more than 100 enterprise customers and operational profitability, raising a $40 million Series A led by Lightspeed and Alpha Wave in 2024. In 2025 the company launched Chemstack AI, an R&D platform that compresses molecule synthesis timelines from roughly 18 months to days.
Light Polymers
Light Polymers is a Santa Clara nanochemistry company built around lyotropic liquid crystals - water-based materials that can be coated directly onto surfaces to manage light. Its flagship innovation is a direct-coat polarizer that replaces the laminated films used in OLED, MicroLED, and AR/VR displays, aiming for thinner, brighter, lower-cost optics with a simpler supply chain. Founded in 2013, the company runs chemical synthesis and R&D in California and application engineering and manufacturing in Hsinchu, Taiwan.
Aepnus Technology
Aepnus Technology is an Emeryville, California cleantech startup that builds ultra-efficient, catalyst-free electrolyzers to turn sodium sulfate - a low-value waste salt produced in enormous volumes by battery-material and critical-mineral plants - back into two industrial staples: caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) and sulfuric acid. By splitting waste salt on-site with renewable electricity, Aepnus lets manufacturers cut disposal costs, reduce emissions, and shorten fragile chemical supply chains, converting a roughly $350-per-tonne waste-handling problem into about $700 of usable reagents per tonne.
Solidec
Solidec is a Houston-based climate-tech company spun out of Rice University that builds modular electrolyzers to make essential chemicals - starting with ultra-pure hydrogen peroxide - on-site from just air, water, and electricity. Its porous solid-electrolyte reactor skips the centralized plants, hazardous trucking, and fossil-fuel feedstocks of conventional chemical production, cutting emissions by as much as 90%. Founded in 2023 by Ryan DuChanois, Yang Xia, and Rice professor Haotian Wang, the company raised an oversubscribed $2M pre-seed round and has been backed by Chevron Technology Ventures' Catalyst Program, the Activate Fellowship, and a NASA SBIR award.
Lukas Hackl
Lukas Hackl is the co-founder and CEO of Aepnus Technology, an Emeryville, California startup building electrolyzers that turn sodium sulfate waste - a salty byproduct piling up across the EV battery supply chain - back into the sulfuric acid and caustic soda that battery makers have to buy. The technology grew out of his UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory PhD work on electrochemical water desalination. After hearing the same waste complaint on road trips from California to Canada, he and co-founder Bilen Akuzum turned a laboratory curiosity into a company that emerged from stealth in 2024 with $8 million in seed funding led by Clean Energy Ventures.
Ryan DuChanois
Ryan DuChanois is the co-founder and CEO of Solidec, a Houston climate-tech startup that spun out of Rice University in 2024. Solidec builds modular reactors that pull molecules from air and water and, using only electricity, make industrial chemicals like hydrogen peroxide on-site - no centralized plants, no long supply chains, no carbon-heavy inputs. A Gates Cambridge Scholar with a Yale PhD and 20 peer-reviewed papers in membrane science, DuChanois traded the academic bench for the factory floor, aiming to abate over a gigaton of carbon emissions a year by reinventing how the world's chemicals are made.
Dioxycle
Dioxycle is a French-American climate-tech company building a low-temperature electrolyzer that turns waste CO2, water, and renewable electricity into sustainable ethylene - the world's most-used organic chemical - at a cost competitive with fossil-derived ethylene. Founded in 2021 by electrochemists Sarah Lamaison and David Wakerley, it aims to electrify chemical manufacturing and recycle industrial carbon emissions at gigaton scale.
Simon Jones
Simon Jones is the founder and CEO of Fluid Efficiency, a Caltech spin-out commercializing 'megasupramolecules' (MSMs), self-assembling polymers that make fuels harder to ignite in a crash and oil cheaper to push through a pipeline. An Oxford-trained inorganic chemist who spent years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jones is the industrial chemist who took a decades-old academic dream of safer jet fuel and figured out how to actually manufacture it at scale. He has collaborated with the original Caltech research team behind the technology since 2008.
Yoneda Labs
Yoneda Labs is building the foundation model for chemical manufacturing - think of it as the AI brain that tells chemists exactly which conditions to use to make a reaction work, before they spend months running dead-end experiments. Founded by three Cambridge graduates and backed by Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the company's software suite (Predict, Optimize, Analyze) compresses reaction optimization timelines from months to days. Their first named partnership with Symeres pushed cross-coupling reaction yields from ~30% to over 90%. The goal: become the universal AI layer for the $5 trillion chemical industry.