Tech
From high school science project to $18.3M: AI-accelerated enzymes are coming for fast fashion’s plastic waste
A U.K. startup, originating from founder Jacob Nathan’s high school science project on using enzymes to break down plastic waste, has secured an oversubscribed $18.3 million in Series A funding.
Founded in 2019 in London, Epoch Biodesign is now a 30+ strong multidisciplinary team of chemists, biologists and software engineers. The startup will use the new funding to scale up production of its plastic-eating enzymes. This means transferring the biorecycling process from the labs where the team has been developing the enzymes to their first production facility this year, which Nathan says will be able to gobble through 150 tonnes per year of waste once it’s up and running.
Thereafter, the first production runs of commercial-scale capacity are expected by 2028 if not sooner, as Nathan says the startup is looking for ways to accelerate the scaling. They’ll be roughly doubling the size of the team over the next 12 months as they work on switching to a higher gear, he tells TechCrunch.
Plastic not-so-fantastic
Stepping back for a second, the world’s plastic waste problem is staggeringly vast, with some 400 million tonnes of the stuff produced annually, according to the UN. Only a tiny fraction of which gets recycled currently being as, in crude cost terms, it’s far cheaper to pump out more virgin plastic than deal with processing the stuff we’ve already produced.
At the same time, the environmental and health costs of unchecked plastic pollution are stark. So there is growing pressure on regulators to act on plastic pollution and on businesses that use plastic in their products to clean up their act.
There are also a growing number of startups working on technologies targeting plastic waste from various angles — including startups applying AI to speed up sorting plastics for recycling and others developing non-fossil fuel-based plastic alternatives. But biorecycling, so leaning on biological entities to help break down resistant waste, is where Epoch Biodesign hopes to make its mark on plastics.
The biotech is developing a library of plastic-eating enzymes with the goal of disrupting the plastic pollution cycle by powering up biorecycling-based circularity — starting with a handful of plastics that are used in common synthetic fabrics. The first materials they’ve developed enzymes to tackle are polyester and two types of nylon (nylon 6 and nylon 66).
A graphical animation of the process on its website depicts waste garments going in at one end, being industrially sorted and/or pre-treated, depolymerized, purified and repolymerized, and then ready-to-use nylon (extrusion) or polyester (pellets) coming out the other end.
GenAI to the rescue?
While some plastic-eating enzymes have been discovered existing in nature, the catch is they are very slow at digesting this stuff — far too slow to help humanity escape its plastic waste mountain on any useful timescale. It’s also the case that we have produced far more types of plastics than enzymes have been found in the wild that can break them down, as yet. And as the plastic keeps piling up, the need for speed increases.
Epoch wants to lend a helping hand to evolutionary ingenuity by using technology tools to accelerate the discovery of biological catalysts that can tackle plastic waste fast. And key to unlocking this mission are developments in generative AI — specifically the rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) — that are helping accelerate the search for biological agents that can be precision targeted at this problem.
“The challenge with biology is that it’s just too complicated,” explains Nathan. “Humans don’t understand how it works. We’ll never be able to rationalize it. Most of these biological questions that we have remain unanswered. So the big shift here has been our ability to understand large, complex data-sets — which is effectively AI.”
“We’re just sort of un-baking the cake and then putting things back together at the other end,” he also says of what this biorecycling process boils down to. He adds that it only takes a “matter of hours” to go from waste fabrics to reclaiming molecularly identical material (nylon or polyester) in a form that’s ready for reusing to make new clothes or other products.
He describes enzyme design as a “ridiculously large search problem” to tackle. But by turning to GenAI, the startup’s scientists have essentially been able to shortcut sifting through possible combinations of amino acid and proteins to land on potentially useful agents — fine-tuning LLMs with information on proteins and amino acids but also feeding in “proprietary data” from its own lab work on plastic-eating enzymes.
“We’ve been able to generate tens of thousands of plastic-eating enzymes in our lab that are unique,” he says, explaining that after querying the AI models to yield promising candidates they switch to lab tests and then feed in more data from their results on the “predicted enzymes” to keep iterating the model until the search turns up “an enzyme that performs in the way that we want.”
“What we’re effectively doing is we’re concentrating hundreds of millions of years, billions of years of evolution into a few cycles in the lab that happen over the course of days, weeks, months,” he adds. “We’re making big evolutionary jumps that would be very unlikely to happen just naturally based on random mutations, natural selection.”
Epoch’s AI-driven enzyme design search has also enabled it to “pretty regularly” get speed improvements on enzymes in the region of 25x, according to Nathan.
“That means we can use less enzyme in our process,” he notes. “We can make less of it. The [capital expenditure] associated with manufacturing that enzyme in the first place goes down. And ultimately, all of that translates into a lower cost of goods for output.”
“We’re not the only company out there which is trying to design biology to do different things … but we really think we’re quite unique in the approach we’re taking in applying these tool sets to recycling — and then to our flavor of recycling: biorecycling,” he adds.
Focus on cost and commercial scale
So far, the startup has built three “best-in-class processes to recycle three very chemically distinct types of plastics” — and scaling those to commercially useful volumes is next on the slate with the new Series A cash.
“We’re building our first production facility in the U.K. this year for our first nylon process,” he says, claiming: “These technologies use entirely new biochemistries. They completely shift the cost bases of recycling into new areas that basically makes recycling the cheaper option compared to virgin.”
A key part of why Epoch is able to drive down recycling costs is the fact its process doesn’t require high temperatures to run — saving on energy costs compared to other forms of recycling which require the waste to be heated and/or melted. Nathan also points out that this means a lower capex for this (lower power) recycling facility — shrinking overall project costs.
The biological recycling process is also “incredibly high yield” compared to industrial recycling — he says they’re getting upwards of 90%, meaning most of the waste that’s fed in is coming back out the other end in a reusable state.
Plus, there’s no “unwanted side products” from biorecycling — which, again, reduces the cost and complexity of recycling the plastic.
“All of these things add up, basically, to reduce cost across the board of the process and get us into a position where — at that commercial scale — we’re reaching cost competitiveness with the materials that are on the market today made from fossil carbon,” he suggests.
Production of the enzyme itself involves a microorganism that’s been genetically engineered to include the DNA for making the enzyme and housed in a fermenter so it can replicate and churn out lots of the plastic digesting stuff — a synthetic biology technique that’s used for many other types of applications, from producing chemicals to novel foods.
Epoch’s approach to recycling plastic could have some additional benefits as Nathan suggests it could incorporate additional purification — by having the enzymes also “scrub” undesirable chemicals — since some plastics contain chemicals that can cause concerns for recycling the material.
Although he concedes that even biorecycling of plastics won’t fix the problem of microplastics where tiny pieces of plastic can wash out of garments that are made from synthetic fabrics and find their way into the environment — posing a hazard to biological life.
Still, he argues we’re going to be stuck needing to use synthetic plastic for decades, adding: “I think it’s really important that that new synthetic plastic is made from old materials, not from newly extracted fossil carbon.”
Designing enzymes to digest other types of plastic waste — such as packaging — is a wider goal for the startup. Although Nathan says they are focused on fabrics first as it’s a huge problem that’s also been getting more public attention. The business case also looks cleaner.
Notably, the startup’s Series A includes a strategic investment by Spanish fast fashion giant Inditex, owner of clothing brand Zara, which has inked a multi-year “joint development agreement” with Epoch — clearly with an eye on improving the sustainability of its business at a time of rising public awareness vis-a-vis the fashion industry’s role in the global plastic crisis.
“We want to produce material that’s actually useful,” notes Nathan. “We want to produce something for brands that is, you know, indistinguishable from the stuff that they’re using today — so in order for that to be true, we need to go through various tests. We need to do this at larger and larger and larger scale. And so having, effectively, the machinery of a business like Inditex with the scale that they have just helps us accelerate that process.”
The Series A round is led by the climate-focused fund Extantia Capital, with Day One Ventures, Happiness Capital, Kibo Invest, Lowercarbon Capital and others also participating alongside Inditex, and a $1M grant from the U.K. government. Epoch Biodesign’s total capital raised to date is now $34 million, including the latest raise.
Tech
Marc Lore says that AI will soon enable anyone open a restaurant
Marc Lore, the veteran e-commerce entrepreneur who sold his previous startups to Amazon and Walmart, has big plans to infuse AI into his current venture, Wonder.
The centerpiece of those plans is Wonder Create, an initiative that would let anyone — from food entrepreneurs to social media influencers — use AI to design and launch their own restaurant brand in under a minute. The virtual restaurant would then go live across Wonder’s growing network of tech-enabled kitchen locations, currently numbering 120 and expected to reach 400 next year.
Lore’s startup, a vertically integrated dining and delivery platform, has evolved from food trucks to fast casual restaurants with 10 to 20 seats. These are not normal restaurants, though; they are “programmable cooking platforms” capable of operating as 25 different types of restaurants based on cuisine, within their all-electric kitchens that are increasingly becoming robotic.
Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything” conference this week, Lore said these kitchens have a 700-ingredient library. The “restaurants” they house actually consist of many different brands that operate from within these locations.
In addition to a staff of up to 12 people in these kitchens, cooking tech, like conveyors and robotic arms, are involved in the cooking process. The company also just bought Spice Robotics, a maker of an automatic bowl-making machine previously used by Sweetgreen. Next year, it plans to offer an “infinite sauce machine” that can make bout 80% of all the sauces found in recipes on the internet today.
Wonder Create was announced earlier this year as a way for anyone to use Wonder’s software to launch their own restaurant brand and recipes.
Lore offered more details as how this would work by leveraging AI technology, describing the plan as something like a “Shopify front-end with an AI prompt.”
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“You type in what kind of restaurant you want to build. It builds the restaurant — AI does — in under a minute. It does the name, branding, description, pictures, pricing, health information, and all the recipes for your restaurant,” Lore explained during an interview at the WSJ event. The would-be restaurateur could then refine the prompt if changes were needed. When ready to go live, the restaurant would launch across all of Wonder’s locations.
The company currently has 120 of these “programmable cooking platforms” in operation, a number that’s expected to grow to 400 next year. As it adds robotics to the equation, the company won’t necessarily reduce headcount, Lore noted. Instead, it will increase the number of meals a kitchen can produce in a given period.
“We have about 7 million throughput capacity with 12 people,” he said. “We see a path to getting to 20 million throughput out of 2,500 square feet with just 12 people. The goal also is…I guess by 2035, to have 1,000 unique restaurants operating out of the 2,500 square feet,” Lore added.
The goal with these AI-created “restaurants” is to allow people to experiment with food in new ways. A restaurateur could test recipes to gauge customer reaction before adding dishes to his own brick-and-mortar locations, for example.
Lore sees other use cases for the platform, too, like letting influencers connect with their audience through their own “restaurant” brands without having to actually launch their own chains.
“It could be a mega-influencer, a micro-influencer — anyone that wants to monetize their following,” Lore said. “Or it could be a private trainer that wants to make specific bowls. It could be a not-for-profit. It could be Disney for [marketing] their new movie. Anybody can make a restaurant.”
Whether that many people actually want to is an open question. Ghost kitchens — a similar concept that promised to let brands sell food without owning a restaurant — had a rocky run in the early 2020s, with several high-profile operators scaling back or shutting down after struggling to build customer loyalty. Wonder’s added layer of automation and AI may address some of those pitfalls, but the model is still unproven at scale.
MrBeast Burger, a famous ghost kitchen experiments, vividly illustrated the challenge. The brand faced widespread complaints over inconsistent food quality — a consequence of relying on dozens of different contracted kitchens and staff. Wonder’s programmable, increasingly automated kitchens are designed to solve exactly that problem.
There are still limits to this idea, Lore admitted. Wonder’s team (including its robots) can’t do things like toss and stretch pizza dough or slice and roll sushi. Instead, Wonder’s focus is on simpler basics like burgers, chicken wings, fried chicken, and bowls.
The whole plan comes together with Lore’s other acquisitions — Grubhub for its 250 million-deliveries-per-year business and Blue Apron for its meal kit business. Now, Wonder is focused on buying restaurant brands, like New York City-based Blue Ribbon Fried Chicken, which it snapped up for $6.5 million in February.
“When you buy a brand — and you can buy a brand that has 10 locations, or even 50 locations — and then overnight put it in 1,000, there’s just an incredible arbitrage there,” Lore noted.
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Tech
Peter Sarlin’s QuTwo reaches $380M valuation in angel round
QuTwo, the Finnish AI lab founded by former AMD Silo AI CEO Peter Sarlin, is now valued at €325 million (approximately $380 million) after raising a €25 million angel round ($29 million). It’s a sign of enduring tailwinds for AI, quantum computing, and sovereign tech, especially for Europe-made companies.
QuTwo’s name is a nod to quantum computing, but it hasn’t gone all-in on quantum. Its core product, QuTwo OS, is an orchestration layer that directs tasks to classical, quantum or hybrid architectures — with the idea that enterprise use cases are often best served by “quantum-inspired” computing, which uses classical chips to simulate quantum behavior on more reliable hardware.
Enterprise AI will be QuTwo’s bread and butter. The company already secured some $23 million in committed revenue thanks to design partnerships with the likes of retail giant Zalando, for which it helped develop AI assistants. “AI is the North Star that we will continue to aim for. Quantum is just a new type of compute,” said Sarlin, who is adamant that QuTwo is an AI company.
Momentum has been building around Europe-based AI labs, and several of them have become overnight unicorns. Just last week, former DeepMind researcher David Silver secured $1.1 billion for his new endeavor, Ineffable Intelligence. QuTwo’s valuation and round size are somewhat modest in comparison but will let it pursue its roadmap under less pressure.
According to Sarlin, who serves as QuTwo’s executive chairman, this was a decision he also made for his previous company, Silo AI, which AMD acquired for $665 million in 2024. “I had a lot of investors who would have wanted to pour a lot of money into making Silo into Europe’s OpenAI, but I didn’t believe in that play,” he told TechCrunch.
The main difference is that QuTwo wants the freedom to think long term, with a five- to ten-year horizon. “We are on a mission to build the globally leading AI company for the next paradigm, given that Europe did not succeed in building the AI company for this era,” Sarlin said.
It’s not that Sarlin is bearish on European AI, of which he is a prolific backer. Nor is he necessarily critical of extra-large rounds — he volunteered that he is also an investor in Yann LeCun’s Ami Labs, which raised $1.03 billion, and in British-American venture Recursive Superintelligence, which is rumored to be following the same path. But he didn’t see a billion-dollar round as the right fit for QuTwo — nor VC money, at least for now.
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Until recently, QuTwo was solely funded through Sarlin’s family office, PostScriptum, which also incubated NestAI, the other company where he serves as executive chairman. But whereas NestAI raised some $115 million in a funding round led by Finland’s sovereign fund and Nokia, QuTwo wasn’t seeking to raise external funding.
However, when the lab’s soft launch generated significant interest earlier this year, Sarlin decided he would say no to checks from VCs and strategic investors, but yes to an angel round in part due to the geopolitical moment Europe is currently navigating.
With Europe increasingly looking to favor local alternatives to U.S. tech providers, there are tailwinds for AI made in Finland. But there is also investor appetite for a company that promises to facilitate more ambitious R&D initiatives in the fields where the region already has strong players, such as the automotive, life sciences and gaming sectors.
Conversely, Sarlin expects that QuTwo’s angel investors could open doors across Europe. There are definitely quite a few introductions he could request from this group, which includes Yuri Milner, Xavier Niel, Nico Rosberg, Dieter Schwarz and Niklas Zennström, and as well as many startup founders from Hugging Space, Legora, Miro, Skype, Supercell, Wolt, and more.
This will also support QuTwo’s growth. It recently expanded into Sweden, and has been hiring. According to Sarlin, some 50 quantum and AI scientists have joined the team, which includes two other second-time entrepreneurs: his former cofounder at Silo, Kaj-Mikael Björk; and Kuan Yen Tan, a cofounder at IQM, the Finnish quantum company that is set to go public.
QuTwo’s connection with IQM is also a reminder that the company believes we are about to enter the quantum era — it just can’t wait. “The question for repeat founders like [us] is how can we have even a larger impact. In the long term, it’s important for Europe that we build the AI company for the next paradigm out of Europe. But, in the short term, we can have a significant impact in driving ambitious R&D moon shots in Europe,” Sarlin said.
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Tech
reMarkable’s new Paper Pure tablet goes back to basics with a monochrome screen
After exploring the bigger market for productivity tablets featuring color displays with the Paper Pro and the smaller Paper Pro Move, E Ink tablet maker reMarkable is returning to its roots with a new monochrome device called the Paper Pure.
The new, $399 Paper Pure succeeds the monochrome reMarkable 2 after six years, and comes with more powerful hardware as well as modern software features that make it competitive in today’s tablet market.
The Paper Pure has a 10.3-inch display when measured diagonally, the same as the reMarkable 2, but the new one is wider, which, the company says, makes it easier to take notes and read text. Notably, the resolution hasn’t changed between the two tablets, staying at 1872 x 1404 pixels with a pixel density of 226 PPI.
The tablet also comes with 32GB of storage, four times the amount you got on its predecessor, and is also about 40 grams lighter, weighing 360 grams.
ReMarkable said the Paper Pure is 50% more responsive than the reMarkable 2, and offers 30% more battery life with its 3,820 mAh battery.
The company has added a slew of new features to the tablet to bring it up to par with modern productivity tools, including support for a web app. The Paper Pure lets you sync your calendar, as well as take and share notes for a particular meeting. And if you import documents from cloud storage services, the online sync service will automatically convert them into a notebook suited for reading and annotating on the tablet itself. The company said it also comes with better handwriting search capabilities.
The Paper Pure integrates with Slack, too, so you can convert handwritten notes into typed text that you can share. It also integrates with collaboration tool Miro, letting you share sketches and the like.
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The Norwegian company said it now plans to sunset production of the reMarkable 2, but will still offer software updates and support to existing customers.
The Paper Pure’s base model comes bundled with a stylus, and the costlier $449 version gets you a fancier stylus, dubbed Marker Plus, that includes an eraser function, plus a sleeve folio in various colors. Users can order the device starting today, and shipping is expected to start in early June.
The company said it has sold more than 3.5 million devices so far, and that it has 1.2 million subscribers for its Connect service, which offers unlimited cloud storage, exclusive templates, and the ability to create links to share notes or sketches.
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