Meet the early-stage startup Hephaistos generating novel enzymes for industry
Not many students find the time to think about founding a startup during the course of their studies. But these six biotechnology students did, during their Master’s at the D-BSSE. They discovered that they had in common an entrepreneurial spirit and, fascinated by the potential of enzymes, they developed the business idea that led to the startup Hephaistos. Here, Jannik Neumann, Lucas Merlicek, Moritz Ullhofen, Ilya Schneider, Lukas Radtke and Arthur Theuer talk about their exciting journey.
What was your motivation to build the early-stage startup Hephaistos?
Realistically, none of us expected to come out of this master's degree on the verge of founding a Biotech company. That we find ourselves in this position now, can definitely be attributed to the excellent research in multiple frontiers of Biotech that we were exposed to at D-BSSE. It is truly fascinating to us, which technologies emerge in the academic labs here. However, we believe that more often than not, the rational next step is unfortunately not taken: Taking the risk and making a technology ready for industry to address our time’s unique problems. Even though we are still at the very beginning of our journey, we are working to reach that goal of creating a startup that translates a technology into direct real-world impact one day.
What does Hephaistos offer, what is your vision and mission - and how did you come up with this name: Hephaistos?
The startup’s name is very much connected with its mission: Hephaistos, in Greek mythology, is the god that creates the tools of the gods. We really believe enzymes are ‘godly tools’. These molecular factories allow chemical conversions with extremely high specificity, low energy cost and low waste production. This does not only make the client happy, but also our environment. As bioengineers, we are naturally drawn to the ambitious challenge of scalable enzyme design. At the same time, as the next generation of scientists that will step into an industry which faces unprecedented environmental challenges, we recognize that the transition to a clean and sustainable enzyme-based production of chemicals must be pursued now.
You are a team of six biotechnology students. How did you find each other and agreed on the company’s mission, and how is the startup structured?
We found each other quite quickly at the beginning of the first semester. Overcoming the challenges during our master studies with like-minded (and sometimes hilarious) people made even the toughest project much more enjoyable. We also soon realized that we shared the dream of being truly free in how we use the skills and knowledge provided by our studies. This led us to pursue the entrepreneurial path.
Inspired by all the technologies and scientific advancements we were exposed to during our studies, we all had some random ideas jotted down somewhere in our phones. When we finally sat down together and discussed these ideas, we found a common theme. We all wanted to solve an industrial problem and try to have a real environmental impact while we’re at it. So one idea stuck: the dream of designing industrial enzymes.
In a startup, especially in the early stages, the most important thing is that we can trust and rely on each other. There are so many things to do, and everyone should know where they are needed and where they can provide the most value. While half of us already worked on designing enzymes during our master's theses, we have an otherwise diverse background of disciplines. Our structure arose naturally from that: as a team of six, we quickly realized who has a talent for connecting with industrial partners or for finding funding opportunities and who can provide the most value by developing our technology or validating in the lab. So yes, while we all started as biotechnology students, we are quickly learning to adapt to the needs of our startup and to show up where we are needed. Most importantly, we all see each other as equal partners in this endeavour.
What were challenges in the beginning and what are challenges now…?
In the beginning, we had a solid idea for the startup and were continuously confronted with the latest advancements in biotechnology. However, the startup scene, meaning: setting up a company and finding partners and customers, was completely new to us. Of course, imposter syndrome always flared up - why should we be able to make this work?
By joining entrepreneurial programs and getting positive feedback from people in the field as well as industry leaders, we realized more and more that this would be hard, but we could do it, we could actually be the team to make this work.
The main technological challenge now is bringing everything together – both the computational as well as lab validation pipeline – and making a successful proof of concept to help us secure further funding. We worked hard to set up a robust computational pipeline, secured lab space and refined our experimental setup. Now we need to prove that we can achieve the results we have worked towards over the last months.
At the same time, learning about market needs and the intricacies of the stakeholder structure and refining our business model is a constant process in a startup.
What is your short- and long-term plan and how are you financed?
As of now, we are finishing our proof of concept to establish our technological credibility. The enzyme we are creating allows for late-stage processing of a pharmaceutically relevant compound class.
This is possible for us, thanks to the non-dilutive funding opportunities we could secure from the ETH-Student Project House, the cross-university programme Talent Kick, the ETH Student Life Science Lab and others, not to mention the lab space in Zurich. To be able to continue our work and reach our long-term goals, finding an investment partner is currently one of our main focuses.
Then the immediate next step will be to develop a ‘minimum viable product’ together with pharma companies, a product with just enough features to be usable by early customers.
In the long run, we would like to see Hephaistos become the go-to solution that expands the use of enzymes and biocatalysis in industry and transforms the way we as a society produce chemicals.
Have you participated in any competitions, what traction have you gained?
Our focus has always been on a strong validation of our technology and market fit, where we benefited massively from exposing our idea to a wide audience as well as several big players in the industry, in order to validate our concept. We have had over 100 in-person or online meetings with people in the chemical, pharmaceutical, agricultural, biotech, food and feed and textile industries, as well as people in academia, VCs, accelerators and legal experts and gained valuable insights into all topics surrounding our idea and the business side of founding a company. We believe this external input has helped us immensely and, more often than not humbled us and made us realize the dichotomy between what we thought was true and what was actually true.
In the past year, we have been part of multiple accelerators. We have participated in the SS24 batch of the Talent Kick programme and won the Team Kick grant. We also were part of the Dec/Jan 24/25 cohort of the German pre-accelerator Climate Founders, after which we were selected as one of four finalists. We have also secured support and non-dilutive funding by winning the BioIncubate Ignite grant, who are additionally providing us with laboratory space for our Proof-of-Concept development at the Life Science Lab at the ETH-Student Project House (SPH) in Zurich. We have also won small pitch prizes, including the ETH Sustainable developmental goal audience prize and the >>Venture>> pitch competition.
We want to explicitly thank Prof. Sven Panke, as he referred two of us to the Talent Kick programme; the Talent Kick team for providing us with continued support and feedback, as well as the SPH Life Science and BioIncubate team for financial and especially experimental support. Ulrich Genick of the ETH-Department of Biology has helped us set up our experimental pipeline and we would not have come as far without him. We also want to thank Andy Meier who shared with us his experience in building a successful spin-off from the D-BSSE as well as providing guidance on how to navigate the Swiss funding landscape. And, of course finally – thank you to our families and friends who have believed in us and supported us along this road.
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