🧪 From Corn Syrup to Chemicals: Inside Houston’s Enzyme-Metal Revolution

Overview

A Houston-built reactor is reframing what modern chemical manufacturing can look like: cleaner inputs, higher yields, distributed plants, and rapid commercialization. Beginning with hydrogen peroxide and expanding into water treatment, national defense, infrastructure, and agriculture, the team scaled from a Home Depot PVC prototype to a billion-dollar operation shipping tanker trucks of product. The differentiator: a process that fuses enzymes with metal catalysts to deliver step-change gains in efficiency and safety — and to build smaller, localized plants that run 24/7.

"We make chemicals in a completely new way."

Tech Breakthrough: Biology Meets Metals

The core innovation is a proprietary approach that pairs the specificity of biology with the robustness of industrial catalysis. By combining enzymes (sourced from living systems and refined in-house) with novel metal catalysts, reactions run cleaner and more efficiently than conventional fossil-based routes.

• Yield step-change: "Instead of having a 60% yield, you can have 96% yield, which is what we have at scale precisely because of these two catalysts."
• Cleaner feedstock: The process literally starts with corn syrup, not oil and gas. Rail cars of corn syrup feed continuous operations, which then oxidize and refine into end-products, with water evaporated at the end of the line.
• In-house capability: Dedicated biology and metals labs grow organisms, isolate enzymes, stress-test them at scale, and pair them with the optimal metal catalysts in mix-and-match configurations.

"We receive rail cars of corn syrup… change the parameters of the plant… and 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."

From Cancer Biology to Industrial Chemistry

The original idea traces back to a striking biomedical observation and a skunkworks peroxide project. A mutated enzyme in pancreatic cancer cells produces locally 50% hydrogen peroxide concentration, creating an immune-evasive “cloak.” Connecting this biology to industrial catalysis unlocked a novel production pathway for hydrogen peroxide — and ultimately, a platform for multiple molecules.

"What if enzymes and metal catalysts could coexist?"

Scrappy to Scaled: Capital-Light Commercialization

Rather than overcapitalizing early, the team executed a lean, customer-led buildout:

• $10,000 prototype: The first reactor was built for $10,000 with schedule 80 PVC from Home Depot, running a bubble column with a membrane to trap enzymes and permeate peroxide.
• Early revenue hacks: Initial sales in September 2016 to float spa hot tub owners in Dallas exposed costly distribution chains for 3% peroxide in the brown bottle. Weekends were spent pouring product into hot tubs; operations were manual and run around 36-hour hospital shifts.
• MIT and YC: In May 2016, the team took unofficial second place in the MIT 100K and pocketed $10,000. Admitted to YC with zero revenue, they deferred one batch, spent 6 months winning customers, then raised a $4 million seed round.
• First pilot and field trial: Seed capital funded a 1,500 gallon reactor in Houston. The first oil and gas field trial came in January 2018.
• Unorthodox go-to-market: A targeted billboard campaign of $10–15K along a single decision-maker’s commute primed the first major contract.

"Capital constraint forces very creative thinking…"

Inside the Plant: Bioforge at Scale ⚙️

The first state-of-the-art plant, Bioforge 1, was assembled in five locations, shipped by truck, and stacked on-site with a rented crane for 4 months. A few specs underscore how the lab concept translated to continuous industrial operations:

• Feedstock logistics: Storage for four rail cars of corn syrup — around 800,000 pounds — keeps the plant supplied.
• Reactor geometry: The core bubble column is 60 ft tall and scaled from a 7 gallon PVC unit to 10,000 gallons, but the chemistry is identical: sparge air at the bottom, feed corn syrup and enzyme at the top.
• Enzyme leverage: "We feed in one Coke bottle of enzyme and you get two to four tanker trucks of product."
• Throughput: Trucks are filled at about 300 gallons per minute. The plant runs 24/7.

"This is the reactor that makes it happen."

Why It Matters: Decarbonization, Distribution, and Customer Centricity

• Cleaner, safer, more efficient: Replacing fossil feedstocks with corn syrup, minimizing toxic byproducts, and pushing yields toward 96% reframes process risk and cost curves.
• Distributed manufacturing: Smaller plants built near customers cut logistics costs and time-to-market. The company handles end-to-end logistics and can load customer or in-house trucks on-site.
• Reshoring momentum: While challenging, building in favorable U.S. regions proved viable. "If you're in a part of the country that wants that manufacturing back… it is absolutely possible to build in America."
• Customer-first scaling: From Dallas spas to oilfields, the approach was anchored in rapid iterations with real buyers — then scaling into larger reactors and full plants once unit economics and demand signaled go.

Risks and Watchpoints

• Process robustness: Enzyme longevity “on stream” and catalyst performance remain central to maintaining industrial uptime and target yields.
• Feedstock and logistics: Sustained access to corn syrup and rail capacity are operational linchpins for continuous 24/7 runs.
• Regulatory and market breadth: Water treatment, defense, and infrastructure markets carry varied compliance regimes and qualification timelines.
• Scaling the platform: Extending enzyme–metal pairings across new products and plants while preserving cost advantages and safety margins is the next execution test.

Key Numbers and Milestones

• $12,000/month — revenue at the PVC prototype’s peak
• Billion-dollar company shipping tanker trucks of product
• 60% ➝ 96% — yield improvement at scale via enzyme–metal pairing
• $10,000 — first reactor build; $10–15K — targeted billboard campaign
• September 2016 — first product made; May 2016 — MIT 100K (unofficial second place)
• $4 million seed; January 2018 — first oil & gas field trial
• 1,500 gallon pilot reactor; 10,000 gallons full-scale column vs 7 gallons PVC prototype
• 60 ft column; 4 months crane rental; built in five locations and stacked like “Legos”
• Four rail cars on-site — around 800,000 pounds of corn syrup
• One Coke bottle of enzyme yields two to four tanker trucks of product
• ~300 gallons/minute truck loading; 24/7 plant operations
• 36-hour shifts during the earliest manual runs; initial customers included Dallas float spa hot tubs buying 3% peroxide
• 50% — peroxide concentration observed locally in pancreatic cancer cells, which inspired the enzyme-driven route

Outlook

The platform is expanding beyond Bioforge into multiple asset types that integrate enzymes and metal catalysts to solve increasingly complex industrial problems. The ambition is to scale a flexible, customer-centric manufacturing network near end-use markets — and to keep discovering new applications of enzyme–metal chemistry as market needs evolve.

"Some of the problems that we're going to solve, they don't exist yet… creating a culture that's willing to be wrong and solve those problems is what's most important right now."