Enabling Seaweed Bioplastics with Flexsea's Thibaut Monfort Micheo

Thibaut Monfort Micheo is the CTO of FlexSea, a seaweed biopolymer company shaking up the plastics industry. 

In this episode of The Paxtier Podcast, Thibaut reveals all about building a seaweed start-up. He also breaks down challenges facing the sector and gives great advice for fellow operators.

In this episode, we cover:

0:00 Intro.

1:43 Introduction to FlexSea.

4:43 Grants.

5:43 Incorporating in UK vs Europe.

6:42 Expansion into Europe.

7:56 Current bioplastics industry and regulation.

11:20 European seaweed cultivation.

14:50 Why red seaweed?

19:30 Seaweed supply chain

22:28 Patenting. 

26:25 Partnerships and collaboration.

28:20 Failures & mistakes.

Transcript

0:00

You don't under deliver because people I think are doing amazing stuff with seaweed, but compared to what might have been promised, there might be a feeling of object delivery, meaning that the bubble bursts and then,'cause there's been these big papers like building a strong EU driven by economy. I think one of the, one of the main things that sea, the seaweed spear is suffering from is that it's being referred as seaweed is, is such a broad term, is that we say plant. It's like plant-based food. If you say someone plant-based food. Okay, what plants? And then it was thinking about how do we remove that water and can we do stuff more like it is done in the plastics industry. And that is by compounding an extrusion European commissioners pushing for recycling.'cause it's easier for them. Lots of money has been injected. Billions, trillions. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to the first edition of the In-Person Pacte podcast. Peter, what did we get up to? We caught up with our good friend Tebow, down in London from Flexi, a fantastic seaweed bio polymer company, developing a whole suite of different Vibe Poer products using. Seaweed. We had a great time down there. Caught up with the team, saw the lab, the new lab. We had a lot of topics that we covered. My personal favorite was the discussion around partnership and competition aspect of Biopolymers and how there there is a little bit of competition that's not always constructive and people aren't necessarily collaborating when they could be doubling down on brand applications, on product development. And he. Really underline his doubts on the European CB cultivation scene. So I thought that was really quite interesting to hear, especially as he developed his points on that. Find out, listen in and let's see what you think. So anyway, Tebow, thanks for joining us today. Yes. First in person. Yeah. First in person podcast. How in, how's it going? X flexi buzz are going really well. Thanks for for swinging my both of you and thanks for following up with us two years on from our first ever interview. I dunno if you remember that with the true It was, it was long. Yeah. But here we are. So give us a quick update on Flexe then. How's was at the moment? A quick update on the last two years? Yeah. The update on the entire company. We have started Flexe two years ago with my co-founder Cardo, who is, uh, currently trying to get a, a break, but we're closing around, so not a lot of break and a lot of work. And essentially we were mainly working on replacing plastics or packaging with. Seaweed. It was a very candid idea. A lot of people still today are trying to do this who had very little understanding, if not nothing in seaweed nor in packaging and little bit I had in plastics because I have a background in materials engineering. But that was it. So we tried with this very standard solvent casting. You take a bit of a polysaccharide if you work with brown seaweed, you take alginate with red, you take agars of carons crazy to work with all vans, good luck. But we mix that with water, some plasticizers. We had a film now, we thought, okay, how do we make this commercially available and industrially feasible? Because a lot of you can make a film very easy in your kitchen, and this is what restart. If you want something that actually lasts as a packaging item, it's robust enough as the right barrier properties can heat seeable manufactured at scale and at good price that is not as easy as it sounds. So that's what we tried working on a year in. We had our first person joining the Adventure Mattia, who's now our C S O, and we started elaborating a bit more on new verticals. So that is izing the waste from the seaweed, yet learned a lot in the meantime on the seaweed its industry. Main products are used wastes and also novel ways of making bioplastics in an anhydrous process because what we're using right now is solvent casting. So we have a, a solve, which is water. And then it was thinking about how do we remove that water and can we do stuff more like it is done in the plastics industry? And that is by compounding an extrusion. So we're also evolving in that sphere at the moment. So those are the three main verticals. And that's a very quick, quick summary of the last two years is. Improving the formulation, solve, casting, and starting to upscale this to automate it. Developing extrusion as an entire vertical for both rigid and flexible materials, and valorizing the waste of the seaweed, uh, by means of microbial transformation. Let's call it like this, to stay quite broad. There's the update we raised Prese. Last year in April and are currently closing our sea round, 2 million pounds. Plus we raised around 1.5 million in grants. So that's the updates. And, and in terms of grants, what kind of grants do you Mainly uk right? Because we're based in the UK and shout out to Brexit. Well, no, it means there's a lot of opportunities in the UK because the UK is like, is putting a lot of money into innovation. It opens some doors, it closes some because some of the partners you can have European. But some of the EU grants are still available. We're going to open a branch in Europe to also have access to that kind of funding. And then there are other calls in competitions we saw recently, the Tom Ford and the Earthshots. Big, big names being interested in seaweed. So it's opening a couple of doors. But it's also, is that your guys's job to be sensitive on the information? That certainly is that access to things like Horizon. Uh, do you still have access to that from being basically Europe Horizon? Yeah. Europe Horizon? Uh, I think we are, but uh, I think the amount of funding might be different whether you come from the UK or not. Yeah. Right. I know that's the case for e I T and e I C. You can get up to certain trenches. Okay. So in hindsight, was that something that you are Happy Decision Incorporated? Do you mean that in the UK Post Incorporated in Europe as as you guys are both Yes. Look at the latest reports on the investment, uh, ecosystem in Europe. I think the, the, the amount of fundings like this in the UK. This in the Switzerland, France, Germany, and then the rest is abyssal. Um, even in climate tech. Even in climate tech, especially in climate tech, there's so much being done opening a company in the. 30 minutes, like 14 or 13 pounds anywhere else. It's like four weeks in Paris to get a meeting with Ireland is actually pretty as well, and they've got good, good links for the American industry. But the overall, I think it, it was a good decision and if you plan to have a second entity based anywhere else, it, it's completely fine as well. But it, it, it, it's not a feasibility issue. It's more of a time that it takes on accountability if you need to do everything else. Yeah. So tell us, you mentioned I repeat. Well, I was gonna say, you mentioned like opening a, like a, an another branch elsewhere. What made you choose the location that you're thinking about? So the location we're thinking about is Portugal because RD investors is going to be Portuguese. Okay. Um, and it's one of their requirements. It's also, we we're hitting two birds with one stone there because it allows us to hit that investment. It allows us to have continue having the access to the Portuguese ecosystem. Which we have been very familiar since nearly day one because we were part of the B B V accelerator. Shout out to the BBB accelerator. Um, the whole team is amazing and we know the Portuguese blue ecosystem very well, uh, from well Blue Bio Alliance. Um, and, and then the ano as well. Uh, they also have a big department of plastic manufacturing and just the whole industry there, especially with the p and they're quite very developed, so that's something we're looking forward to, to work with them as well. Yeah, and it will give us access to the whole Europeans as well. It is the whole thing, like box. We mentioned cheaper, we mentioned plastic industry. Could you give us a quick update on. The currency, the bioplastics. And what are your thoughts are with, by currency you mean the pricing, sorry, not currency. C drivers. The demand, your perspective drivers is calling in lobbying with that. Mouthing for me, but it kind is the truth. The biggest actor able to deal with petroleum words, it's cheap, got volumes able to continue. Makes sense. Now, their image is also an issue and so they want to transition to something a bit more green. So de facto derives the whole carbon and floodplains and the LCAs and the Biobased complex, et cetera. The fact is, in Europe, European Commission is pushing for recycling'cause it's easier for them. Lots of money has been injected, billions, trillions, and not a lot of space is being allowed for bioplastics. And I feel like if at least one of the trillions that was put in recycling was invested in bioplastics, we might see something happening. But the legislation is like one key. The re is not on point. The taxonomy is not on point. People dunno what plastic is. People don't dunno what the bioplastic is. Is it bio-based or is it biodegradable? What is biodegradable? Is it compostable, industrially, or at home? In what conditions? In what timeframes? Those are all questions that remain unanswered. So, so the, is that more consumer or regulate for everyone? The consumer will apply. I mean, if you have to throw a plastic in the recycling bin, the recycling bin is here because the municipality put a recycling bin here because it's part of a regulation, there is a certain way and certain items you can recycle and it sounds like you don't. So the regulation will set, the directive is literally the, the single, you use plastic directive. It's a directive, it shows the direction, but whoever writes this might or might not be influenced by the industry. Because European Commission folks are no plastic experts. They have advisors there. Those advisors are picked within the industry. So the biggest guys in the industry will advise them. Mm-hmm. Meaning that change is always been hinder by this. So this is why, even though there's competition in the bioplastic sphere's, a huge I'm seeing is, is there. All p a scene. The Biobased Polyethylenes, the the PBAs, pbs, P HHAs, and the starch. There's a lot. Yeah. But altogether, at some point we have this, this urge to change the petroleum side, and then we'll see about competing together. But at some point there's also synergies to have together. So this competition in the technology in the market, but in the legislation, everyone wants to have their own thing. And if you can have your thing approved and also be a barrier to your competitor, it's better. So quite a complex challenge. I think that was one of the main purposes of the CWE chat in Paris, organized by the Global Snic Coalition and, uh, UN C T A D, while the representative David, uh, Vidi was there to essentially be a, a bit of a translator for the European PERA because the plastic treaty, the un plastic treaty was being negotiated at Paris. Essentially he said, well, out there they don't have a, they don't really have a clue about what they're saying. And it's interesting to go to see innovators and scientists that are looking for niche solutions to what's their external point of view to this. What I, what I was gonna ask is, you mentioned that c facing, not massively spoken about in top eu, um, places, and Kylie, it is starting, it is starting. But because it arrived there quite quickly, it might be a bit of a bubble effect, right? And that bubble is already bursting a little bit. Uh, because if you over promise a lot of stuff and then you deliver, you don't under deliver because people I think are doing amazing stuff with seaweed. But compared to what might have been promised, there might be a feeling of object delivery, right? Meaning that the bubble bursts and then,'cause there's been this big paper site. Building a strong EU blew by economy. But I was gonna say, so that leads on what, what are the numbers of sea we produce in Europe? Exactly. That's what we're gonna ask. That's exactly what we're gonna ask. Like how does that lead off? We've been grilled a suit up. I've been grilled a few times about European farming and, and we get to hear your perspectives on that. We have our own opinions, but that I don't, I don't see it happening. Yeah. I don't see it happening on the, on the scales needed for bioplastics, for at least. No, I think on local scales for local ecosystem, uh, services, yes. The space you need, the, the workforce. The neighbor is not gonna be there unless you have crazy automation that is crazy cheap and develops like this. Authorization is also going to be a big problem. I think the way to start is what I think aga Pego is trying to do by doing the seaweed farming next to, uh, offshore wind farms. Yeah. Tell me if I'm wrong, but someone is trying to do it with wind farms, which I think is, is brilliant. That's where the authorizations already are. You have a lot of traffic. If you think about it, Europe is literally just like only traffic, well traffic. Uh, because compared to a larger continent like Africa, the Americas in general, the amount of coastline you have for such a small surface of land means that a lot of freight is going around. There's a lot of tourism, there's a lot of activity. Yeah. I should say just going seaweed farms like this might not be as easy. Uh, the. Difference in nutrients, currents, water temperatures. Yeah. Seaweed can theoretically grow everywhere but best taking seaweed as a whole bunch of 14,000 species. I think one of the, one of the main thing that sea, the seaweed sphere is suffering from is that it's being referred as seaweed is, is such a broad term, is that we say plant. It's like plant-based food. If you say someone plant-based food. Okay. What plants are you using? Yeah. Isn't it something like the F A? The F A O only reports something like 20 species that cultivates the sing worldwide. That that sounds about what? 13,000 species And they're still discovering them. I think it might be less. It's I think 20 is what they define, but then it's basically made up of eight species. Yeah. That are just like your keywords. Yeah. But how does that lead up camera? And then the, the browns. Uh, but browns are nice and expert. The macro, this is the laminaria, uh, opia for the, for the reds as well, for sushi, the laminaria. Uh, there's some, uh, and maybe some other browns, which I'm not expert in. And as I mean, yeah, I mean, I don't think they've really expanded that much into new, new things. I mean, I was wondering, is it of any interest at all for flexing. As you seem to focus on reds and which are not predominantly from around here, let's say Not at all. Yeah. Not, not. Can we talk about red, your Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Because it it's on, it's on their website. We Red Sea. Yeah. We're, we're, we're very comfortable talking about reds, pros and cons. Uh, about reds, research Browns mainly because greens are not really here for bioplastics. A Nova is doing a, is doing a tremendous job pushing that. I think as well practically, Anova, you can't not know I'll because they don't have a website. Uh, but they were here at the Rethink Materials in, uh, London, and they do, they also do extrusion quite an interesting looking, uh, material, but I think they use all vans and then rounds, I don't know if there's the whole starch in it. It's Woodland pretty starch, which is what I, Novo uses the starch from there to then make, um, petroleum and uh, natural seaweed compounds. To essentially increase the amount of biobased compound in Europe because they, they know Philippe is a very smart guy who knows the, the European gestation in the back of his hands and he was also in Paris with me. And he understands that in Europe things are pushing towards recyclability. So if you can make a compound where you have a bit of seaweed, you, you lower the carbon footprint and you have something that is recyclable, it's better for that market. It might not be what we are looking to do, but for that market, he might be correct. Yeah, people also have different ways of approaching. But yeah, to talk red versus, uh, Browns production of red versus brown is roughly the same. Now reds might still be a bit higher, uh, but reds are mainly cultivated. The cultivation of browns in Asia very hard to track. And the amount of the heavy metals you have in there is in China. Uh, so, uh, reds are mainly cultivated, uh, for the agars and the Carinas. The numbers are there. There's an industry that is quite existent, although quite fragmented because it's Southeast Asia, there's a lot of traders and middlemen. I think the price agrees by 40% just with the middlemen from the farmer to the processor. A Garza Carins. When it comes to bioplastics, we feel that, uh, they have, they offer better properties in the field. Ally on the transparency part, uh, where alginate, you could achieve transparency with alginate, but you need quite some chemical modification, which I believe is what. Sway is doing, don't quote me on it, but I know it's in their patent. And, uh, yeah, quite a lot of interesting things to do with argenate as well. Better barrier properties to water, uh, but lower optical properties, different ways of processing, but overall, it's an extraction on employee saccharide. We're growing going with red because that's where the industry. We believe is today. And the, the supply is, I think in total eight. GAR is 23,000 tons worldwide Carin and 79,000 tons and Argenate, only 49,000 tons. And on the other hand, if you want to produce stuff in Europe, a lot of companies will say, yeah, we don't take harvested seaweed. We take only cultivated seaweeds. They take it from Europe. They're gonna be limited to a couple of tons, maybe be tens of tons, hundreds if they're really lucky in the us. I know, uh, the guys at the Crop project are doing, uh, they essentially. Are collecting and working with farmers to get, uh, most of the brown seaweeds in the us uh, and then turn it into powders to then sell to processors. They started selling, but the numbers are a couple of tons because the sector is still developing. So if you want thousands of tons, Asia, Asia is 99% of the work production, and that's the hard truth. So we can look into developing ecosystems and geographies. If you want to see where there's a lot of sea already being rolled. Yeah. I think red is also better because, for example, in Africa, if you go to Tanzania, um, or just as a buyer to get the, the, the more specific location, you already have a couple of thousands of tons that is available there in um, Brazuca, a couple hundred tons in Tunisia, couple hundred tons going to thousands soon. So I feel like if you want to have geographical flexibility, Reds in terms of amount of supply, traceability might be a bit easier. Browns, and there's maybe be a bit more people looking into browns, especially in Europe and in the US because colder waters and this, the knowledge we have in Europe is more located on brown species than reds. And uh, this is an amazing, uh, episode of the Inside Sea Week podcast. I said, uh, but essentially she says that in Europe we should start. We should stop trying to reinvent the wheel and ask in Asia what they know, what to do, how to do, and they would do it a lot better. Uh, so I think that was a great insight of the Insights Me podcast. Uh, and we should definitely all strive to learn for what exists. Yeah. Otherwise, we'd be spending money and stuff that would take five or 10 years to develop only to find out what has been empirically proved. Yeah. For decades. One of the questions though is around the, uh, supply chain when obviously C four, sorry, from, so we obviously you probably get this question a lot, these guys in Europe probably back themselves. In regard we are using a short supply chain where we are not shipping it thousands of miles. Um, and what's the kind of response that you'd get to that obviously. So supply chains being more established in Asia, but if you're putting sustainability and circularity of the products first, it is like, where does that sit in the, in the yard if they could sell it. Sure. And it's how, how many cwe companies in Europe have, uh, shut down or go bankrupt in the last two months? I know three saying from the Inside Week podcast, the, the Dey Brothers as well. Uh, they have an amazing podcast as well. Where number brothers? Uh, well, there's two Des for sure, but only she is doing the podcast just. But uh, in, uh, I think it's episode nine or 11, Oliver Bearer said, yeah, yeah. He's saying, okay, cool. You can grow seaweeds before you grow. Know who you're gonna sell it to. Yeah. So if you have all those great arguments, you can't sell it to anyone. Your seaweeds started to grow. This is great to rot and, and the main part of this is the price. So you're in sea can exist today if they go to the right market. And plastics are not the right market. That's why I'm not looking to get European seaweeds for plastics yet. It wouldn't make economic sense. Am I looking to, in the future if it also making economic sense? Absolutely. Because as we said, supply chain will be a lot leaner. Traceability is there. I think the great argument we have in, in places where the fragmented industry that we haven't needed, doesn't exist yet, is that we're working with. Whiteboard, it's blank. Mm-hmm. So we want to do things correctly and that's what the seaweed, the Global Seaweed Collection is pushing, is having the right frameworks, regulation and safety, uh, and good manufacturing practice. If we can do that at, from the GetGo, we can build a solid groundout, which wasn't really the case in Asia. So that's the protocol. On one hand, you got potential to do something well, but it's very small. On the other hand, it's already big, but, and this is what Sea Green has been trying to do, is. Retrace back that, that, that, that whole traceability and understanding the whole industry and how un unravel the fragments to make it understandable. It's very hard to do. Yeah. But the scale is there. Yeah. Yeah. No, actually that's a good point. It's mostly like availability, sea, medium, and obviously the market you're gonna pick is the higher value animal feed and buy industry. Absolutely. Healthcare, pharma. Yeah. People grow bva. I know. Um, at Kora grows BVA when they sold medical vehicle in dust and pump drive. Vulvas sell per 50 per keto. Yeah. How do you want to make plastics or shifting? Kidding. Patterns? You mentioned patterns today and it's something that I think about is whether or not. You should patent a cwe company, uh, product on at what stage. So you guys are thinking patenting now. You patent it up to people've, already patented Absolutely. What we're doing. I saw an article recently, I wouldn't remember who it was, but the, the headline was, This patent could make seaweed farming go mainstream. Uh, yes. That was the sea Flo sea flour seed. What, what was it on? Something to do with putting seaweed in bread baking products. Oh, it's not making anything mainstream. I, yeah, I didn't share that title in order, in order to make, in order to make, I mean, how is the patent gonna make something mainstream? Unless you go for a licensing model and it's so amazing. Wants it, I don't dunno, I don't, it's gonna make, if anything, a patent that's made to protect you. So not to go mainstream unless you are the mainstream man you become, or Microsoft, I have to read that one again. We, we have patent it, so we have. Three patents. We have one that is already granted, which is on the films, and we connect to different verticals. Each patent is essentially an umbrella to cover each vertical. The sovereign casted films is patented. We just applied for the country applications at the moment. So the P c T is live, the priority paid that is granted. Then we have one on the extrusion stuff that is still pending, and we have one on the bio technology aspect. There's also pending, uh, and essentially all those are covering metal vertical. Yeah. A patent is a a sword, not a shield, until it becomes both. Let me explain. Once you apply for a patent, you have interiority. So if you try to do what I'm doing, I can say no because I'm doing it already. And if you want to apply for a patent, it'll come up in the searches. No, you can't do it because this guy is already doing it. That's the sword is I say, no, you cannot. It doesn't protect me. FlexSea's Thibaut Monfort Micheo. It is like, it's not like, oh look I have a patent. Uh, I want to defend myself until it gets granted. So until the patent is granted, it's more of a, no, you cannot do it because I'm already doing it once I had it. Granted, if you try to do, then it becomes a bit more of a mess if you really try to do what I'm doing.'cause it's granted because it's most likely going to be used in a licensing, uh, or so it's on the market. So you have something to back it off, and then you, you're legally covered. I'm not an expert in patent law, but essentially that's the way I'll sum it up. And so writing a patent is something that needs to be clear enough to explain what you're doing. But obscure enough so that it doesn't just give away everything you're doing. Because if you want to write a patent that is a bit like yours, but I want it to be a bit more like mine, I'll go around and usually if you know how to do it, it works. And this is why I'm saying it's more of a sword than a shield because it doesn't protect you fully. But you could use it to say, no, they're trying to do this, or whatever they're saying that is different. A kapo, it's not really because I was givers and I guess the upside is a not. Than you guys to be like, we have a lot of it is because investors are they too? Yeah. So it's mostly for investment companies, um, or companies like, I think NOLA does that or work a lot with trade secrets. It's a different kind of strategy. Um, s I mon have patent. I don't seen one. I don't think they work the trade secrets, but they might have joints once because they do a lot of the. Projects with, uh, grants and a lot of consortia, so I don't know how their IP outputs there. We make it so that all the IP belongs to us. Whoever we work with would be academia, industrial partners, commercial, whatever. All of our IP belongs to us, but yeah, I IP is, is a big thing when you get to the market. If you want to go to licensing, you have to license something. If you go to third party manufacturing, you can have specific agreements with non-disclosure terms. If you manufacture yourself, you don't care about patents, just do trade secrets and it's easier. Talking about like trade secrets and stuff, do you find that in the bio space, like with TV especially the other companies are open to partnerships as No. No. At all. Do you feel like as in In competitors, within competitors and the bioplastics industry? Yeah. I know that GI Maurice from, uh, Buso is always saying that he's open to collaborate with everyone and everyone should collaborate, and he's right and wrong. He's right in the sense that people should work together to make the industry progressive. Of course, where I think it's not wrong, I think it might be a bit naive, and if you're watching this, you, we've already talked about it. It's more of a, you know, your company's your own baby, like your heart, soul, butt sweated, tears in there collaborating. It might not be easy for everyone to accept. Not everyone is open for it. Certain names in head in mind, it could be a refuse or blocked potential Partnerships sometimes because of their own decide decision making, sometimes because their investors don't want to. Yeah. So you, you enter doing collaborations is quite a complex mm-hmm. Thing in terms of joint development between competitors, dark competitors. I think where there would, there is need to be a lot more collaboration is between whoever makes the material. I. The sourcing and the downstream processing. This makes a lot of more sense from the battery network. Yeah. Is also would like to push more collaboration like this. It's about how do we make it work. I'm not an expert into it, so I can't say too much, but how to make a JV in terms that mess you up or mess up and are good for everyone. It's tough. It's very important and we're seeing a few hour guys do this now, but I haven't heard back like so much feedback on that front. We saw Sym, Brosia really advocating for it, but it's a long process. We're, I realized we're actually blitzing through time here. Like it's been so easy to flow, but it's already. Do you wanna, just the last question around either mistakes or books, whatever you want. Yeah. Your, any, any big mistake that you've had. What if you could think of a big mistake and what you learned, what advice you might give someone else to navigate that? What would you, what mistake come to mind? I, you learned from trying to do, do things for cheap. Sometimes works, but you gotta be really careful with. What you need to spend your money on. Like we've been really good at spending not a lot of money. Yeah. Uh, but maybe some of the things you should have spent a bit more from the get go to accelerates. Uh, I'm thinking, especially working with academic institutions, some of them will be extremely slow. Although they're cheap and that's why you're told to use a grant. Joint projects with academia when you start and then go to a private centers who have a bit of money to pay, maybe pay a bit more in front. Yeah. Gain some time. It's a bit better. Interesting. But then some academic organizations, the ones we work with right now, we've done a lot of, we, we probably had projects and I've worked with over 15 universities, maybe 20, uh, the ones who we are working with right now, I mean, we send a message in the group, can we cover those days to try this machine? Yes, you can come. It's part of the, of the, of the grants we already have with them, and it's, it's fantastic. It's, it's as if we have the machines, so finding the right partners and not being scared of spending, I know right up front it might be a bit of a risk, but it's money you'll have to spend in the future anyways. If, if you show it's a good investment, you can use it as leverage to raise more funding. I think being a bit more aggressive with our fundraising, maybe we weren't lucky in terms of the timing because we are one of the latest kids on the block. We company created, created 2021. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, uh, sway 2020 for the, for the creation of the company. Like 2017, back when it was skipping. Rocks Lab is 2014 or 2013 even. Zero circles 2020. Uh, L Warrior was 20 16, 0 was 2020. So yeah, when you're a bit younger or what we try to do is learn from the others. Yeah. And, and try to do what they do. Better, faster and differently. Not so that he get accepted. Dude, unbelievable. And I love it. Tibo, thanks so much man. Thanks for swinging around, love. Catch up with you guys. Hope you enjoy it. Whistle stop tour on Flexi and check these guys out on all social media chats or websites and you stay smooth. Look, look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback. See,