In March this year, Polybion announced that its bacterial cellulose facility would be scaling up production. What is not widely known is the work that had gone into Celium prior to that. Could you tell us how the work started, and what all went into it?
When working in the first pilot space, a dear friend of the Gómez Ortigoza brothers, Pepe Armenta, shared a very interesting material he accidentally derived from a bacterial process. The brothers experimented with this material and were amazed by the outcome; it was like bad quality leather, but they knew they could turn it into a high-performance biomaterial since using bacteria instead of fungi seemed 'logical' to them.
It took the Gómez Ortigoza brothers almost a year to realise the real opportunity was in the bacterial alternative to leather instead of the mushroom material for packaging. When asked about their decision, they stated that when it comes to bacterial cellulose, "nobody had gone deep enough." Or, as Richard Feynman noted, "There's plenty of room at the bottom." Motivated by this promising biomaterial, its implications, and the global problems to be solved, the Gómez Ortigoza brothers entered greater competitions and won more national and international awards.
By this time, Polybion's Fungi Lab focused solely on working with bacterial cellulose and the name given to this biomaterial is Celium. Axel realised he could use the agro-industrial food waste produced locally to feed the bacteria, making it perfect for a circular economic model.
By 2019 the potential of the next-generation materials industry was becoming visible, and some key characters came on board: Ariel Gómez Ortigoza, advisor in business development; José Luis Hernández, advisor in production and industrial scaling; Eduardo Parra as a financial advisor; Manuel Aguilar as a genetic and scientific advisor. Their integration helped Polybion define a direction and contributed largely to the improvement of Celium.
In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and motivated by Polybion's award in the Mass Challenge Acceleration Program, Mariana González contacted Alexis. Mariana González was part of the European food-tech-focused fund, Blue Horizon, and said she was very interested in investing in Polybion.
Polybion's team met Blue Horizon's Team. After long diligence, Polybion became a Spain-based company, successfully closed their first multi-million euro round, and became BHV's first investment in next-generation materials. Under the idea that no biomaterial solution is effective if companies cannot scale it, Polybion decided to focus the investment capital on two main goals: building the First Of A Kind Biomanufacturing Facility in Latin America (FOAK1) and gathering a world-class team.
