green-chemistry
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Science & Startups wants your research to pay its own way
Berlin’s university startup service offers founders free advice, lab access and a route to equity-free funding. The harder assignment is teaching a good experiment to become a business.
Chris Valencius Put an Art Director Inside a Biotech Lab - Then Made Silk Speak Business
After two decades in advertising, Chris Valencius moved from selling familiar brands to translating unfamiliar molecules. At Evolved By Nature, his job is to make silk-derived biotechnology legible, useful and commercially real.
Evolved By Nature
Evolved By Nature is a Boston-area biotechnology company that turns discarded silkworm cocoons into a liquid, renewable protein platform called Activated Silk. From that platform it builds a library of natural peptides and biopolymers used as petrochemical-free alternatives across three markets: clean skincare and cosmetics ingredients, biodegradable finishes for leather and performance textiles, and injectable biomaterials for medical aesthetics. Founded in 2013 by silk-chemistry veterans Dr. Gregory Altman and Dr. Rebecca Lacouture, the company has raised roughly $190M including a $120M Series C and counts Chanel among its investors and partners.
PlasmaLeap Technologies
PlasmaLeap Technologies is a Sydney-based cleantech company building modular, non-thermal plasma reactors that make ammonia, nitric acid, fertiliser and hydrocarbon eFuels from just air, water and renewable electricity. Spun out of the University of Sydney in 2019, its 'lightning-mimicking' process replaces the century-old, fossil-fuelled Haber-Bosch route with room-temperature, on-site chemical production. Its eNFix containerised units let farmers make green nitrogen fertiliser at the farm gate, cutting emissions and supply-chain dependence. The company raised roughly A$30 million in a Series A led by the Gates Foundation, Investible and Yara Growth Ventures to build first-of-a-kind fertiliser hubs in New South Wales and Tasmania.
Tina Boville
Tina Boville is the co-founder and CEO of Aralez Bio, a Berkeley-based biotechnology company using directed evolution to make noncanonical amino acids - the building blocks behind a growing share of modern medicines. A biochemist trained at the University of Colorado and Caltech, where she worked in Nobel laureate Frances Arnold's lab, Boville turned an engineered enzyme platform into a company that can produce over 100 amino acids in single-step reactions, cutting manufacturing waste by up to 99%. She has been named to MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, is an Activate Fellow, and in 2024 raised a $12 million Series A to scale production to tons per year.
Aralez Bio
Aralez Bio is a Berkeley, California biotechnology company that uses engineered enzymes and directed evolution to manufacture noncanonical amino acids (ncAAs) - the specialized building blocks used in peptide drugs and other pharmaceuticals. Spun out of Nobel Laureate Frances Arnold's Caltech lab in 2019, the company runs biocatalytic reactions that produce enantiopure ncAAs in a single step with water as the main byproduct, expanding the amino acid toolbox roughly 1,000-fold. Aralez sells a catalog of thousands of exclusive amino acids and offers custom synthesis and ton-scale production for pharmaceutical customers, including partners among the world's largest drug companies.
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.
Novoloop
Novoloop is a California-based circular materials company that chemically upcycles hard-to-recycle plastic waste - the grocery bags, food films and mailers that mechanical recycling can't handle - into virgin-quality, high-performance polyols and thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU). Using its proprietary Accelerated Thermal Oxidative Decomposition (ATOD) process and Lifecycling platform, the company turns post-consumer polyethylene into materials used in footwear, electronics and automotive goods, with a substantially lower carbon footprint than fossil-based equivalents. Founded in 2015 by childhood friends Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao, Novoloop has raised over $50 million and counts On's Cloudprime sneaker among its first commercial showcases.
Sarah Lamaison
Sarah Lamaison is the co-founder and CEO of Dioxycle, a Paris- and Bay Area-based climate-tech company building electrolyzers that turn industrial CO2 into ethylene and other chemicals using only water, electricity, and waste carbon. A chemist trained at Ecole Polytechnique, Cambridge, College de France, and Stanford, she turned her PhD on artificial photosynthesis into a company aiming to decarbonize one of the planet's dirtiest industries while staying cost-competitive with fossil feedstocks. She raised $17M in Series A funding led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital, won the L'Oreal-UNESCO Young Talent award, and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30.
Nicholas Flanders
Nicholas Flanders is the Co-Founder and CEO of Twelve, a carbon transformation company that converts CO2, water, and renewable electricity into sustainable aviation fuel and carbon-neutral chemicals. A Stanford MBA and former McKinsey consultant, Flanders co-founded Twelve (originally Opus 12) in 2015 alongside scientists Dr. Etosha Cave and Dr. Kendra Kuhl to commercialize breakthrough electrochemical CO2 conversion technology developed at Stanford. The company has raised over $790 million, including a $645 million financing round in 2024 led by TPG Rise Climate, and is building AirPlant One - the world's first commercial-scale e-fuels facility - in Moses Lake, Washington.
Hermann Tribukait
Hermann Tribukait is the co-founder and CEO of Atinary Technologies, a Lausanne- and Silicon Valley-based deeptech startup that built SDLabs — a no-code AI/ML platform compressing years of R&D into days. A Harvard-trained economist who helped coin the term 'Self-Driving Labs®' in 2017, Tribukait has channeled a career spent brokering $200M+ in global R&D partnerships into software that lets machines design experiments, learn from results, and iterate without human bias getting in the way. Atinary's tools are now used in pharma, biotech, chemicals, and climate tech, with a physical self-driving lab open in Boston since early 2026.