This reactor in Houston, Texas,

represents a whole new approach to

chemical manufacturing. We make

chemicals in a completely new way. We

started off by making hydrogen peroxide.

Now we sell products for water

treatment, national defense,

infrastructure, agriculture, you name

it, we make a chemical for it.

>> The story of Cyogen is as scrappy as it

gets. It all started with this prototype

built out of PVC pipes the founders

bought from Home Depot.

>> In its heyday, this did 12,000 bucks a

month in revenue. Fast forward to now,

Cyogen is a billiondoll company shipping

out tanker trucks of products that power

critical US industries. So, how did they

go from this single beaker of hydrogen

peroxide to this full-scale

manufacturing plant? I visited Solen HQ

in Houston, Texas to find out.

What do you guys do here? What is solen?

>> We use biology to create chemicals that

allow us to create smaller chemical

plants and have a cleaner, safer, more

environmentally friendly footprint.

We've invented a process called chematic

processing where we take the specificity

of biology by taking an enzyme and

pairing it with a metal catalyst uh

which is what's traditionally used in

industry. What we've done with these is

by marrying these two, you can actually

create more efficient reactions. So

instead of having a 60% yield, you can

have 96% yield, which is what we have at

scale precisely because of these two

catalysts.

>> Syogen is the first company to fuse

biology and chemistry in this way.

Pulling enzymes from living cells, in

this case corn syrup, and pairing them

with novel metal catalysts. The output

is chemicals that can be used in

everything from agriculture to skinare.

Traditionally, chemical plants relied on

fossil fuel feed stock, which has led to

all kinds of unintended consequences.

This new approach is cleaner, safer, and

more efficient. We receive rail cars of

corn syrup, and then we run our utility

system. We change the parameters of the

plant, the way that the enzymes are

reacting, the way that the metal

catalysts are reacting to oxidize the

corn syrup how we want. And then at the

end, we evaporate water. We take the

final products, we store them in

finished good tanks or we send them to a

blend farm to get blended with other

chemicals and that's the process.

>> Sogen started with a true Eureka moment,

the kind of freak invention that

normally happens only in science

fiction. Shawn was working in the

chemicals industry and Gorb was in

medical school studying pancreatic

cancer.

>> I was working on this like skunk works

project to try to do direct hydrogen

peroxide synthesis where you react

hydrogen and oxygen gas directly

together over a metal catalyst. And like

you know I was working on this project

and then Gorb was like oh yeah no like I

found this like really crazy mechanism

in pancreatic cancer where it's like

locally 50% hydrogen peroxide

concentration. I was like what that's

wild.

>> It turned out that an obscure enzyme

found in pancreatic cancer cells that

Gorb was studying was the key to a new

process for making industrial hydrogen

peroxide.

>> So these pancreatic cancer cells they

put out peroxide. Peroxide creates

almost like an invisibility cloak around

the pancreatic cancer that makes it

difficult for immune cells to come in.

It was like that's a very interesting

discovery, but why? And so once we asked

the question why, we found out the

reason was an enzyme. It was just a

mutated enzyme that's found only in

pancreatic cancer. And so that's when we

said, what if the two worlds could

collide, right? What if enzymes and

metal catalysts could coexist?

>> Here's how it works. Cyoggen feeds corn

syrup to the enzymes, the same ones from

the pancreatic cancer cells, which

transform it into new compounds. They

then use metal catalysts to further

process those into the final chemicals

that can be used to build all kinds of

products we use in our everyday lives.

In most chemical plants, the feed stock

comes from oil and gas, which inevitably

produces toxic byproducts. Solugen

literally starts with sugar. We have to

suspend belief for a second. People

believe that anything to do with biology

and chemicals, it's just a bad mix

because, oh, biology is too sensitive.

It's going to break down blah blah blah

blah blah. But we said let's just

suspend that criticism for a second and

just look at the numbers and we say if

we can make the enzyme last this long on

stream and the product is this

concentration we can make a lot of money

and that's where we started.

>> This insight that organic enzymes could

operate at industrial scale and

efficiency was the company's first key

breakthrough. Today Scen operates both a

biology and metals lab where it produces

its own enzymes and metal catalysts

inhouse. These are actually enzyatic

reactors. So what we do, we grow bugs,

we break the bugs open, we take the

enzymes and we put them in these

reactors and we can stress them out and

figure out what they're capable of doing

at scale. We have outfitted this with

probably some of the best uh analytics

that you can ever have for enz enzymes

which gives us a good insight into how

things will scale.

>> Across from the biology lab is Cogen's

metals lab. We just went to the the

enzyme lab. Yeah. But basically now we

pair that enzyme with the right metal

and so you can basically mix and match

which metal and which enzyme you want to

pair together.

>> Their next big insight was a commercial

one. Previous startups that had tried to

do something like this all started by

raising a huge amount of funding and

building a large scale plant. Sigen took

a different approach. They built their

first reactor for just $10,000 and then

started selling to customers almost

immediately. Gradually they scaled up to

larger and larger plants. So you did

this technoeconomic analysis and you're

like, "Wait a second. This could

actually work."

>> So May 2016, we got unofficial second

place in the MIT 100K competition.

>> We lost.

>> We got We lost uh gloriously, but we got

10,000 bucks.

>> $10,000. That doesn't seem like very

much money.

>> I think capital constraint forces very

creative thinking cuz like with 10

grand, like you have a very confined

space of what you can afford to buy to

try to make the product. And so ours

ended up being PVC like a Walmart shelf.

You know, we couldn't even afford the

metal catalyst parts. It was just the

enzyme portion.

>> This was the very first solen reactor.

>> Yep. This is the first one complete with

schedule 80 PVC from Home Depot. This is

like a bubble column with a membrane. So

you sparge air in to the bottom. Inside

there's the liquid with the corn syrup

and the enzyme and it's kind of spinning

in a loop. Then they're reacting which

makes the peroxide and then this is a

membrane and so the membrane keeps the

enzyme in the bubble column and then the

permeate on the membrane is the peroxide

product. Armed with just their $10,000

reactor but no customers, Shawn and Gorb

applied and were accepted into YC. But

they deferred a few months and set out

to first try and sell the tiny volumes

of peroxide they could make.

>> We made our first product in like

September 2016. We couldn't afford any

controls, right? This is a total manual

operation. We'd come in in the morning.

We would try to get this reactor to a

steady state. And then I'd go to work.

He was He'd go to the hospital. He was

in his last year of med school.

>> I was on surgery rotation.

>> On surgery rotation.

>> Wow.

>> Yeah. 36-hour shifts.

>> Good times. And then in the evenings, go

in and try to retune it to a steady

state. And then our first three

customers were float spa hot tub owners

in Dallas. We discovered the supply

chain dislocations because for these hot

tub owners, they were buying 3% peroxide

in the brown bottle on the store that

went through multiple distributors,

multiple downpackers, putting in little

brown bottles, shipping it to the store,

retail markup. It's like, oh, we only

have 10 grand, but like we're actually

manufacturing the chemical and we're

like bypassing like huge distribution

value chains. So on weekends, we would

put pour the chemicals in people's hot

tubs. We looked at a bunch of markets to

be like what can we just like wedge

ourselves into? When we first accepted

Soligen into YC, they had zero revenue,

but they deferred by a batch and spent 6

months getting those first customers. By

the time they started at YC, they were

gaining traction. Typically, when people

think about hard tech companies like you

guys in YC, they're like, "That makes no

sense. What could you possibly

accomplish for like a few hundred,000?"

To most people, it intuitively seems

hilariously mismatched to the like costs

and timelines of something like a new

chemical plant. This fundamentally goes

back to the customer experience, which

is what YC taught us to do, right? It

was really like for me it was like grad

school for customers is how I I look at

YC where it's like the second you have a

PhD in your customer and you're an

expert in their world, then you know

exactly what you can and can't build.

It's that simple. If you know this

customer is not the right fit, that's

okay. Go to the next customer.

>> I remember the picture of the beaker

because in your like demo video, that's

what it was.

>> Do you remember this? The blue beaker

and then we had the color change back

and forth with the metal catalyst. But

but I remember another thing about your

application, which is even though the

only thing you'd actually made was like

one beaker full of this stuff, you had

the idea completely worked out. Like you

totally understood the reason that this

would work. You'd worked out all the

technoeconomics. Like all the math was

done. The idea was fully flushed out. I

don't think the idea like the core idea

has changed one bit since the blue

beaker phase.

>> Literally the same.

>> Yeah. It's just like a million times

larger.

>> Yeah. Is this larger?

During YC, you guys are still driving

around with like buckets of peroxide and

selling them to spas. You finish YC, you

raised your $4 million seed round. What

What happens then?

>> So, we moved to where our customers

were, which was Houston, Texas, and we

used the seed capital to build our first

big pilot reactor, not just a PVC pipe

reactor, but a proper 1500gallon type

reactor.

>> And then our first oil and gas field

trial was January 2018. And so we had

billboards targeting this guy so we

could go get our first oil and gas field

truck.

>> Wait, you had billboards targeting one

guy?

>> So what we did, there was one guy um at

at the saltwater disposal company who

controlled all of the chemical spent.

What we figured out was where he

frequents like he actually goes to the

field where he goes and where he lives

or at least the neighborhood he lives

in. and we bought up the billboard and

billboards are cheap

>> along the highway that he commutes to

work in so that every day as he's

commuting to work he's just seeing your

billboards

>> and then eventually he gets a call from

us. It's a it's like a priming aspect of

it that look we knew this was the guy. I

was willing to spend 10 to 15K just to

make sure that we can get in front of

the guy. And the second that he saw that

and he got a call from us, he was like,

"Oh, I see your billboards everywhere."

And so that's when he felt special,

right? And this goes back to the

customer experience. Do you think the

CEO of DAO would do that? No. No way.

They're not going to do that. Soon, Syen

had signed enough customers that they

were able to raise money again and build

their first state-of-the-art plant, the

Bioforge 1. So, this is Bioforge.

Everything you're looking at here was

built in five locations simultaneously

and then shipped here on trucks. We

rented a crane for 4 months and just

stacked it up like Legos. So, all of the

tan tanks are filled with corn syrup.

That's our raw material. We were able to

hold four rail cars of corn syrup at any

one time, which is about 800,000 pounds.

>> So it's like 800,000 pounds of corn

syrup in these four large tan tanks.

That's the starting material for the

whole plant.

>> That's the starting material for the

whole plant. And then the plant runs

continuously 24/7. So this is the full

scale version of the PVC reactor. Is

this the bubble column?

>> This is the bubble column.

>> It's so tall.

>> 60 ft tall. It's identical to the PVC

reactor from Y Combinator. It's just

10,000 gallons instead of seven gallons.

We sparge air in the bottom, corn syrup

and enzyme go in the top and the two

react together.

>> All the other stuff is necessary, but

like this piece is the magical piece,

right?

>> This is the reactor that makes it

happen. Yep. We feed in one Coke bottle

of enzyme and you get two to four tanker

trucks of product. That's how efficient

the enzyme is.

>> Wow. After filling up the tanks, Syogen

loads up trucks to distribute the

chemicals to nearby customers.

>> So, this is the end of the line. This is

where customers pull up uh either with

their own trucks or Solent supplies

trucks and does all the logistics for

them and we're able to fill up trucks at

about 300 gallons per minute.

>> Building out lots of factories near

customers to keep shipping costs down is

a key part of how Syen has managed to

undercut its larger competitors. What

has it been like to build new like

physical stuff in America? It is

definitely challenging, but if you're in

a part of the country that wants that

manufacturing back that's favorable to

manufacturing, like it is absolutely

possible to to build in America. What

does Syogen look like in 10 more years?

>> It's actually going to be multiple

different assets. So, we're actually

like we've taken enzymes and metal

catalyst and applied them to not just

bioforges, but other types of

manufacturing assets that combine them.

And we'll be solving the most

fascinating customer problems that like

right now like we're not even aware of

them. some of the problems that we're

going to solve, they don't exist yet.

And so it's like just creating a culture

that's willing to like be wrong and

solve those problems is actually what's

most important right now.