A year of success
🌱 HydRegen is a biotech company delivering cleaner, safer and more economical chemical manufacturing strategies.
🚀 We are now looking to raise £8m, focusing on accelerating our growth, increasing joint-development capabilities and therefore fast-tracking licensing and revenue generation via commercial manufacturing.
🌟 A Year of Triumphs! As we reflect on the past year, we’re thrilled to share our remarkable journey—from scientific breakthroughs to business achievements. In the wake of our successful 2023 fundraise, we declared 2023 as the year of “GETTING COMMERCIAL”.
Our year in pictures!
🚀 Accelerating Commercial Success: Introducing Bio2Amine Catalyst
Bio2Amine Catalyst: We secured the IP rights for this groundbreaking catalyst early in the year.
First Evaluation Product: Within months, we launched our first evaluation product in June 2023.
Customer Engagement: Our outreach efforts have yielded over 50% progression to orders.
Feedback Loop: Leveraging data exchange discounts, customer feedback enhances our products.
Team Synergy: Our cross-functional teams seamlessly transitioned from R&D to product delivery.
Joint Development: Continuing to hit customer and partner deliverables on joint development work.
Licenses: An option to license signed with others under discussion.
Further products: Now we are using this demonstrated delivery route for our pipeline products.
In December 2023, we were delighted to welcome Joe de Sousa a as a Non-Executive Director adding a wealth of knowledge of the pharmaceutical sector to our capabilities. Joe is already adding huge value in our technology development and on ensuring we are tackling the right challenges to level-up our partnerships in the pharmaceutical sector.
“With HydRegen, I was immediately struck not only by the energy and ambition of the team, but also by the potential HydRegen technology has to make a real impact in the pharmaceutical sector and many others”
- Joe, more here.
We have also added 5 new scientists (Rebecca Bogart, John Boyle, Piera De Santis, Yinqi Wu and Supapit Wongluengon) and a program manager (Tara Lurshay) to the team over the last year, giving us new technical skills, perspectives and networks as well as increased capacity to take up new partnerships and projects.
🏆Awards
HydRegen Wins Pioneer Group and CPI ‘Golden Ticket’ Programme for Planetary Health Innovations.
Holly Reeve, HydRegen CEO:
“We are delighted to win the Golden Ticket award. Access to incubation and support at such a prominent site with so much expertise and specialist facilities for biotech and hydrogen related scale-ups will fast-track our growth over the coming months.”
- read more and see the video!
We were delighted to win a place on the UK trade mission to San Francisco, led by Innovate UK Business Growth, which centered on attending SynBioBeta. This was an excellent opportunity to meet other leading UK companies in the sector as well as US-based partners and investors.
🤝 Technology De-risking
Our customer journey typically includes a joint development phase, where we at HydRegen, use our expertise and knowhow to develop a process that meets customers needs. We have been delighted to work on projects across a number of sectors, and are currently in discussions with new potential partners.
This year we signed an option to license with a large chemicals company, highlighting the value that we can add in competitive bio-based manufacturing capabilities.
Another key success was with Almac, who demonstrated our technologies in their Kilo-lab facilities, showcasing a significant technology de-risking step for our H2BioCat product!
📈 Impact Strategy
🔬 With new data, comes new opportunities for modeling the transformative impact that HydRegen technologies can have on the chemicals sector. Our recent partnership with the Clean Growth Fund provided a great opportunity to validate our models with top-tier expert consultants.
The result?
A predicted 3x CO2e reduction, on average, if HydRegen technologies are used in commercial hydrogenation manufacturing processes.
Our modeling compares moving precious-metal hydrogenations from batch to continuous flow, and then from metal-based to HydRegen's bio-based strategies. Our sustainability and cost savings are directly aligned, and largely center on minimsing energy demands.
As yet, we have not modeled any cost or sustainability savings from our more streamlined down stream processing requirements or other indirect manufacturing benefits, so more to come in the future! 🌱💡
🎯 Business Strategy
💡 We have refined our commercial strategy and incorporated new approaches to enhance our market traction. In addition to selling evaluation samples and collaborating on development projects with both existing and prospective customers, we are adopting more proactive strategies.
Through our partnership with Carbon Limiting Technologies, we have analyzed the aromatic amine market and pinpointed key chemical products where we can offer competitive advantages in technology, sustainability, and cost. It was great to verify that the leading chemical producers often have ten or more of our initial target products in their portfolios, and we are intensifying our internal development efforts to present a demonstration of our capabilities to these companies soon. 🚀🌐
🏆 Achievements
🌟 Intentional Leadership: A Journey with Horizon37. Outcomes shared in Horizon37 's full article Our transformative partnership with Horizon37 has reshaped HydRegen. From deliberate culture investment to commercial success, we’ve evolved. The Board’s support empowered us to invest in leadership and beyond. Our progress hasn’t gone unnoticed—customers and the Board alike recognize our step up. As we move forward, we’re committed to better meetings, decision-making, prioritization, and communication—all aligned with HydRegen’s commercial goals. 🚀🌐
📢 Shout Outs
💡We were delighted to be awarded Innovate UK funding, for a collaborative project with AM Technology, focusing on scaling Bio2Amine for manufacturing of a paracetamol intermediate and another active pharmaceutical ingredient (>£0.9m). This project brings together deep chemical engineering knowledge, scalable continuous hydrogenation infrastructure and our Bio2Amine tech for more sustainable and cost efficient processes. Being able to leverage chemical and process engineering knowledge ensure we keep large scale process requirements in our minds, and fast-tracks our technology de-risking. This builds upon a early piece of work with AM Technology that was published last year🌟
🔬 Another collaborative project this year focused on scalable manufacture of hydrogenases, with Dr Simone Morra at University of Nottingham. Working on de-risking and scaling enzyme manufacture in parallel with our chemistry ensure we can support customers with their manufacturing requirements. Read more here. This will be continued via a iCASE studentship awarded to Regina Galán Bataller and Dr Morra's group in 2024.
We were delighted to send Yinqi Wu, a new member of the biology team to 'Upstream Bioprocessing training at IBioIC' scale up training, as part of our commitment to up-skilling our staff but also to ensure we have the right access to skills within our lab-based teams.
🌟 New Look!
🚀 We launched our new look! Where our logo elegantly blends our core competencies and values.
👩🔬 Our biotechnologies are changing the way that hydrogen can be incorporated into organic molecules via sustainable and scalable biocatalytic hydrogenation. Our new logo incorporates this with a H atom in a hexagon.
♻ We wanted to keep the feel of sustainability and recycling, and we love how the colours and shapes keep that feeling of circularity and movement.
🎙️ Announcements
With our 2023 Fundraise, came a time of growth, taking on a new biology lab, building out the biology team (from 1 to 4 people!) and investing in a new scalable bioreactor to transform our capabilities. The Chemistry team also brought in new skills in organic and analytical chemistry as well as facilities such as inline benchtop NMR and new hydrogenation capabilities.
We have attended many events in the last year. A couple of noteworthy events include presentations or panel discussions at:
ChemUK where Holly was asked to contribute on 'enabling empowering cultures' in science
SCI Engineering Biology where Holly discussed the successes and challenges in commercialising biotech
IBioIC event and Industrial Biotechnology Leadership Forum events where Will and Matt both contribute as experts in the field
Energy Challengers where HydRegen was selected as a finalist in the 'green molecules' track
Green and Sustainable Chemistry where Sarah presented the technology to a mixed academic and industry audience with excellent feedback and new potential partnerships
Holly was involved with the UK-Swiss Engineering Biology meeting at the Swiss Ambassadors residence, where topics included policy and public awareness in the field, as well as opportunities for bringing the two countries closer in collaboration.
🙏 Asks
We are always seeking introductions to potential customers, and experts in hydrogenation, biocatalysis and sustainable chemistry.
💰 Investment
We are looking to close a £8m Series A in 2024, if you are interested to find out more, please contact Holly Reeve.