Visolis
Two secular trends are disrupting the chemicals space in western economies:
- A shift from fossil fuels & petrochemicals in an effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and reduce dependence on Russia/OPEC
- Moving production of critical commodities onshore and favoring resilience/reliability of supply over lower cost offshore production
One of the holy grails of the chemicals industry is replacing a traditional petrochemical process with a renewable, carbon negative alternative that can be manufactured cheaply in the US or EU.
Visolis operates a proprietary materials discovery platform that is searching for — and subsequently producing — these holy grail chemicals. Their first solution, MevAcid, is a platform molecule with a wide range of end products, leading to consumer applications ranging from cosmetics to tires.
In the future, most industrial chemicals will be produced without fossil fuels from precision fermentation with genetically engineered microbes. As Visolis continues to develop and scale their technology, they will be producing these industrial chemicals at commercial scale, which will be the foundation of the new bioeconomy.
We’re excited to be backing Deepak and the entire Visolis team on their mission. Here is a Forbes article with a few more details.