Name: Inside The Startup Reinventing The $6 Trillion Chemical Manufacturing Industry
Uploaded: 2026-03-22T21:35:38.000Z
Duration: 13 min 8 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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.

The story of Soligen 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.

Soligen is a billion dollar 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 Solugen HQ in Houston, Texas to find.

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 chemiensomatic processing, where we take the specificity of biology by taking an enzyme and pairing it with a metal catalyst, 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.

Cygen 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 skincare.

Traditionally, chemical plants relied on fossil fuel feedstock, which has led to all kinds of unintended consequences.

This new approach is cleaner, safer, and more efficient.

We receive railcars of corn syrup and then we run our utility system.

The way that the enzymes are reacting, the way that the metal catalysts are reacting to oxidize the corn syrup how we want.

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.

Cyanogen started with a true eureka moment, the kind of freak invention that normally happens only in science fiction.

Sean was working in the chemicals industry and Gaura 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 then, you know, I was working on this project, and

then Gore 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.

It turned out that an obscure enzyme found in pancreatic cancer cells that Gaurav 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?

What if enzymes and metal catalysts could coexist?

Cyagen 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 feedstock comes from oil and gas, which inevitably produces toxic byproducts.

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 suspend that criticism for a second and just look at the numbers and we say, if we can make the enzyme lasts this long on stream and the product is this concentration, we can make a lot of money.

This insight that organic enzymes could operate at industrial scale and efficiency was the company's first key breakthrough.

Today, Cyagen operates both a biology and metals lab, where it produces its own enzymes and metal catalysts in house.

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 analytics that you can ever have for enzymes, which gives us a good insight into how things will scale.

Across from the biology lab is Silagen's metals lab.

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.

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 techno economic 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.

I think capital constraint forces very creative thinking because 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.

Yep, this is the first one, complete with Schedule 80 PVC from Home Depot.

This is like a bubble column with a membrane.

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 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, Sean and Gorb applied and were accepted into yc, where 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'd come in, in the morning, we would try to get this reactor to a steady state.