Defining the Right Problem | Henrik Hagemann from Puraffinity

Welcome to the Lab to Market Leadership podcast, where we explore the journey of turning advanced science and engineering into market-ready innovations. Join Chris Reichhelm, founder and CEO of Deep Tech Leaders, as he speaks with Henrik Hagemann, CEO of Puraffinity and a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree in 2019.

In this episode, Henrik shares insights on the importance of identifying the right problem to solve via 200+ face-to-face meetings with potential customers and partners, the meticulous research process, and the journey from lab to market. Learn how Puraffinity is tackling PFAS contamination and the strategic pivots that led to their success. 

Whether you're a deep tech entrepreneur or interested in the commercialisation of scientific breakthroughs, this episode is a must-listen.

Learn more about Lab to Market Leadership: https://www.deeptechleaders.com

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Podcast Production: Beauxhaus

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Overview
• 3:00 Henrik Hagemann's Background and Early Influences
• 5:00 Origin and Vision of Puraffinity
• 7:00 Deep Dive into Technology and Problem Identification
• 9:00 Challenges in Research and Development
• 11:00 Competitive Landscape and Market Entry
• 16:00 Customer Discovery Process
• 19:00 The Pivot to PFAS
• 23:00 Regulatory Impact and Market Urgency
• 32:00 Business Strategy and Future Vision
• 53:00 Closing Remarks and Outlook

Transcript

Henrik Hagemann: 0:00

It was way more valuable to pick the right problem to work on, than to spend lots of effort getting the technology progressed for the wrong problem.

Chris Reichhelm: 0:10

Welcome to the Lab to Market Leadership podcast. Too many advanced science and engineering companies fail to deliver their innovations from the lab to the market. We're on a mission to change that. My name is Chris Reichhelm, and I'm the founder and CEO of Deep Tech Leaders. Each week we speak with some of the world's leading entrepreneurs, investors, corporates, And policy makers about what it takes to succeed on the lab to market journey. Join us. If you are building a deep tech, hard tech, frontier tech, advanced science and engineering business, you need to be listening to today's podcast and I'll tell you why. Because you don't want to end up like the myriad of other businesses out there with no commercial traction or an interesting platform technology that just won't scale. These problems, which we see again and again and again, you probably have seen them too, come back to the start of the lab to market journey. And in particular, the ability to isolate the problem that your company will ultimately solve. I'm not just talking about the market that you'll serve. I'm talking about the problem your company will solve. What process will you go through to identify and clearly define that problem. How many meetings will you have? What kind of research will supplement those meetings? How will you draw the dots and make the connections you need to to come up with the right solution? Joining me today is Henrik Hagemann, who's the founder and CEO of an advanced materials company called Pureaffinity. They're developing adsorbent material that filters out PFAS, fluorinated chemicals, forever chemicals from industrial water streams. And Henrik is going to talk about the remarkable journey his company has been on to define the problem they're ultimately focused on solving. I hope you enjoy. Henrik, I am so pleased that I'm getting to have this particular discussion with you. The many companies that I've met and advised over the years, yours stands out, actually, for a couple of reasons, and one, because I think of the journey your company has been on to define the problem that you guys are addressing, and two, because of the strength and quality of the problem itself. I think there are so many lessons here. for listeners of this podcast. So thank you so much for being with me today. I'm very excited to be here. And I, yeah, I'm going to have to get you at some point to say the comment you gave to my team about what I was like after the session you ran at Enterprise Hub. Yeah. Oh, cool. I'll, I'll send it. Exactly. You have a remarkable background. You have, uh, you know, you're an immigrant, you're from Denmark, you have a, uh, a master's from Imperial College, uh, You have lived and trained as a Shaolin monk, and you have cycled from China to Denmark in, I think, something like 87 days from memory. Um, you know, you clearly embraced challenge. Was becoming an entrepreneur always on the cards for you? I think, I think it's an interesting one. Just looking back and zooming out a little bit. I, as a younger, younger kid, I remember thinking I would like to work in something bigger than me when I got older. And I used to think of it as, because it's Denmark, people don't build large ventures. They, they build small companies. I was thinking, Oh, maybe I would be self employed. And that was kind of my initial idea around it. Uh, I didn't even know you could build proper institutions like large companies, uh, from, from scratch. That wasn't in the mindset at all. No, nobody does it. That's interesting. And we think about the European affliction, almost the, you know, the, you know, the conservative approach, the, the fear, the approach to risk. And you felt that at an early age. Definitely. Even being the, you know, I, I've done the things like the cycling that are more risk taking, but even in that category, it just doesn't show up as an option. Yeah, that's interesting. But you set up, you still set up a business and you set up what would become Pure Affinity in 2015. How many of there were you in the early days? It's an interesting question as well. We, we were quite a big science team. So many of these ventures that start with science, they're quite a lot in the beginning. So we were 11 of us. One of them was our supervisor. And I was one of the 10 who had been selected for the science and engineering team. Uh, out of that group, most of them, most of us, were to do PhDs. And so actually, after the calling of who wants to do this full time, we only became two. Okay. Okay. So it was you and one other. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I was, I was not even that keen on setting it up in the beginning. I thought I was going to do my PhD first to, you know, get the accreditation and sort of become the scientific or engineering lead. Yeah. And there was my, my co founder who was pushing saying like, no, like, what, my weight, you know, there were people saying maybe there is something here, uh, this, this smells like good timing. And what was the inspiration for it? You know, had you guys been working on something? Had you been developing something in that team? Was there something else? Yeah. That's a great question as well. We, we dug in really deep to what, what large issues there were. So we were given this kind of whiteboard room over the summer at Imperial and asked from nine to six to brainstorm ideas of where we would apply these kinds of new scientific endeavors. In our case, it was synthetic biology, but you could choose your tool if you wanted to. And there were several themes that came up. One of them was the clean water for all. And we didn't, we didn't want to do this kind of, you know, the stereotypical Imperial College comes with solutions for the rest of the world. And so we really dug into it and saw that actually there were some contaminants in water that much. More than others, mm, screw us. So they contaminate way more water than other contaminants. A bit like our power law distribution that we were used to seeing in engineering classes, science classes. And so we, we had that early idea of take the personalized medicine approach, the targeted vaccine approach that we're used to in biotech and moving it into the environmental space, the environmental applications. We then single out these little bad boys that are the worst and impact us the most. These bad boys being the contaminants within the water. Yes. Yeah. Okay. And. What was the, what was behind the selection of these contaminants? Ah, that's also interesting. It was actually the, it was partly the engineer in us and, and in me who was looking at the chart of size of contaminants versus what technologies can tackle them. And everything that's below, you know, nanograms size, or around a nanogram size, most of it is not that toxic. You know, it's an ion. You need ions in your body. But there are these synthetic chemicals that we have invented as humans that are around that size and that are toxic. And we saw either you can increase the pressure massively, and so increase the energy utilization significantly by orders of magnitude, to get rid of them, or you could look at what if we only singled out the ones that are unharmful, Uh, because otherwise you, you increase the carbon footprint significantly just to polish the apple. There's a lot of polishing of the apple in this scientific world and you're just wasting energy and resources. Yeah, that's interesting. What came first? Did you have a technology platform that you had already semi established or developed? And then you, and then were you looking for the applications? Or was it, let's kind of blue sky this and think of the industry we want to serve and the problem we want to solve, and then we'll build something for that. Yeah, this was another thing for that competition. There were lots of academic groups that entered this synthetic biology competition with a technology and then tried to say, oh, let's use it for this to win this competition. And the different thing about the Imperial approach was, let's put these undergrads, who have no idea what they're doing, they're completely fresh, and let's ask them to develop a new technology, bottom up, and see if it even might work. Um, so we, we sat in that, yeah, that room in, in July, 20, 40, 2014. My God, it's been a while. Yeah. With no technology. And we knew we had to present at MIT in November to compete against 250 universities with something. Okay. So this is a competition you're competing. It's going to culminate with MIT. And you've got to have something there. And so in that timeframe, you, you, you zero in on the, on the problem you want to solve, and then on the approach you're going to take, what skills, it was just the two of you still at this time. Yes. No, this was the 10, 11 of us. Okay. Now you have 10 or 11. Oh, right. Okay. So, um, okay, okay, so this is before it whittled down to two. I see. Yeah. And, and what, these are Imperial students, so what kind of skills and experience are on the team? Yeah, that was another interesting approach. I was just talking to the, the president yesterday at this, uh, conference. about how they've always been good at bringing disciplines together and always focusing on bringing different disciplines to focus on a problem space. And so they actually selected us 10 students from a group of maybe 150 students from across the faculty of engineering, science, natural science. Everything from sort of, uh, biochemistry to bioengineering, uh, they would have basically 50 50 engineers and scientists in the final team. Uh, and I was one of the engineers, my co founder was one of the scientists. Uh, and you would definitely get tension between the different types. Some would be like computational engineers, and they had no idea about the lab. And some would be very biology leaning biochemists who have no idea about the computational side, and you have to get them speaking the same language. Yeah, that's interesting. That's really interesting, especially at these early days. And was it helpful? I think it's a great pressure cooker, uh, for some of these startups to, to go through. We, we had it as a pressure cooker. It was very taxing for some of the teams. Some of them needed months out after this, this four month sprint. Uh, but it really builds bonds and it forces you to collaborate. You cannot just sit back and be like, Oh, this is going to be okay. I have three years for this. So what happens with the competition? Do you guys win it? No, we came second and we're so disappointed. So people, people now say, Oh, you know, you've got the paper out of it and you've got the, I don't know, the company out of it. And they say you, you've done great with it, but we still, we lost the first place, if you ask any of us. So it's a sort of chip on the shoulder. One of the people in this space. Likes to say, chips on the shoulders, put chips in the pocket, so you kind of, you have something to prove. People still laugh about it because we, we did win something. So we won the industry track. We had like several areas that we are recognized for. Um, and so although we came second, we, we helped to define some of the competition moving forward. So our focus on the internationalism of the competition, which was really about the diversity of the judges and the teams. We were 50 50, male female for our team, uh, basically showed that more diverse teams outperformed less diverse or more homogeneous teams. And the competition took that forward as a recommendation for the way people design teams and how they sort of enter this big competition. So we got some initial industrial interests where they were like, Oh, this kind of, this feels a little bit like when they came up and first started developing antibodies, you know, it feels like really a lot of white space, lots of contaminants you could go for. Uh, we would love to have you come and present, uh, at these conferences or at these, uh, UN events. We even had to decline some of it because we didn't have the bandwidth. Uh, but there was that point. There were only two of you because I think the rest had dropped out. Was that right? At the competition, we were all there, but going out from it, it whittled down to two. And it was an interesting whittling down. First, we were six who were part time, because there was a part time, uh, pre accelerator, and then another pressure cooker happened, and we whittled down to four, and then we whittled from four to two, and it was like, okay, last people standing. So, tell me a little bit about the path you went on post MIT competition, now it's just the two of you. You're getting invitations to go and present. You've worked up something, an approach, and you've got a market and a problem to solve in mind. What happens then? Yeah, we, we got the first, uh, sort of grant from a synthetic biology commercialization engine here in the UK. And, uh, it had a few clauses. One of the clauses was they wanted me to do it full time instead of the PhD. So I eventually caved after a few months of saying, no, I can't do that. Uh, and then the other part was this difficult, challenging period of going to talk to customers. Um, so they were pushing this program where you have, even if you're a science based company, you have to go and talk to 10, uh, for 10 weeks to talk to more than a hundred customers to learn about who, who are you going to sell to? What's the value chain? How's this going to, to operate at scale? This is 100 companies, not 100 individuals, you have to speak to 100 individuals, could you have a few individuals at the same company? You could try, but it's unlikely, it's more likely to be several different ones. That's remarkable. Is that a common, so that was a feature of the program you were on. Yeah. And it was quite, it's quite cool. So it's, it's run by the Americans. Uh, so the NSF I Corps really pushed this. It comes from the godfather of, of startups, Steve Blank and his academic sort of collaborator, Jerry something. And the year before us, our cohort, Steve Blank actually came and. taught part of the course. So the people at, at this, uh, SynBio commercialization engine, they definitely were well connected within this space. It was quite impressive. Uh, it was nuts for most of us. We were like, how are we going to talk to so many customers, present our findings every week, uh, and then sort of, you know, know more about what kind of scientific stuff we need to do, because we're pushing on the scientific barrel at the same time as the commercialization was getting a push of this program. And what was, so you're putting pressure to develop the science faster, I guess to develop to, to more clearly define your technology approach. And at the same point, you're applying pressure to figure out exactly what the market wants, and what market, and, and ultimately the problem you're trying to solve. What was guiding your technology or scientific approach at the time? Did you have inspiration from somewhere else? Yeah, I think this, this points to one of the key trade offs. Honestly, when I look back at it, it was very hard to do both. And I think what, what we gained the most from was we had some technology start by doing the competition. So we have a little bit of a proof of concept that we could move to capture different contaminants in water more selectively. But the main issue we had was really what problem to work on. It was way more valuable to pick the right problem to work on, than to spend lots of effort getting the technology progressed for the wrong problem. And so we, we realized that trade off during the time and we, we put our foot off the pedal slightly for the scientific effort. in order to more clearly define the problem. Yeah. I get that. So you decide to slow down the scientific push in order to more clearly define the market and the problem that you're trying to solve. Yeah. And I, we even had to, so we did that, you know, painful process for 10 weeks. And I got to say the first time we did it. We kind of struggled, we didn't get easily to a hundred customer interviews. Some of the backstory that most people don't know is we, we actually did it twice. So we did it once in 2015, uh, to find out, okay, we are going to do water treatment. Because there's a lot of other applications we could go for. We had seen, you know, we had presented jackets that were fluorescent with bio based leather that you could make with our technology and it had gone to the Victoria and Albert and some people got excited about it. Uh, we had presented other applications that we could do, uh, but we ended up honing in on this, let's do the water application. And then in 2016, we did the whole thing again for 10 weeks. That time we, we hit 117 customer interviews. And I felt a lot more comfortable, sort of, with the pain of talking to customers and learning and teasing out what are the wants, what are the needs, what are the challenges. Tell me a little, 117 meetings, that's, that's, that's something else to define the problem. I think that's remarkable. Tell me a little bit about the process you used. You know, when you're in these meetings, what are you doing? You having just random discussions? Tell me a little bit about the nature of the engagement. Yeah, I would definitely, I'll talk about the mistakes I made and how I had to correct for them. So I, I, in the beginning it was very much like, Oh, we've developed this thing. Let's talk about that space. And, you know, people get excited, they get carried away with the technology or with the new sort of promise land that this, this leap can bring the customer or the end user into. Um, so we learned by sort of by error that it's much more valuable. You get much better data if you focus on their workflow. There is this kind of book called The Mom Test, where you basically have the end user, the customer, talk about what their problems are. Hopefully one of them out of 10 problems is something to do with the space you're interested in. But sometimes none of them are, and you just, you know, you just sit there and listen for an hour to problems that you have no vested interest in yet. You're almost like a therapist early on, you're almost like a therapist. Tell me about your problems and they start going through stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's also one of the few things you can get senior people to actually talk because otherwise they're like, Oh my God, I'm being sold at again. I'm just going to call this short. I'm not interested. Yeah. So do you, and do you have a particular agenda? Is this, you know, you're, I'm assuming in terms of format, you're meeting these people face to face, you're having a conversation. There was a big push to get out of the building. So you had to like go seek them out, go find them on the shop floor, go like seek them out in the environment. If they go to conferences, you go to that conference, you try and find them. So you can see their body language, how they respond when they talk to you. And these are companies that would be potential customers or partners for your company. Yeah, many of them. So there might be a textile manufacturer, there might be an oil and gas company where we really have to hustle, like cold email, cold message, go through the network, go through the university. Oh, I'm just a lowly little student at this university. Please. Can we like talk to you? great industrial mind about some of our projects. I get it. And so at this stage, it's still fairly broad industrially for you. You're not speaking with 100 water companies at this point, or companies around the value chain. We're trying to talk to the water people within these different companies. and learn about what challenges they had, uh, and really map out what's genuine data versus someone trying to be nice. And there's so many niceties in the UK, and even within the scientific space, where people are like, oh, that's a cool little, like, technological innovation. Maybe I'll, you know, support it a little bit down the line, or I can give you a letter of support for a grant application if, if you want to get a little bit more support from a funding agency. And it's, it's just, it's not genuine data. Yeah. How, so over the course of these engagements and discussions that you're having with them, how does your approach to getting this information from them change? It really moves into that, that kind of, get them talking about the wider space, what are the problems they have, and then using questions like, tell, this sounds interesting, this, you made this comment, so you, you'll see me in the interview notes, I take a lot of notes, it's because I can use then back their words, I'll be, sorption media, the Belgians will talk about sorption media, Well, tell me more about what you're doing within that space. What are your considerations? And so you gradually want to steer them down to talk about their wants and needs within a space that's maybe relevant to you. Hopefully for some of them, I will say in the beginning, I just left thinking, I know a lot about this, this bin collectors day to day, but I haven't really gained much, you know, for the startup. I've got to go again. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Yeah, but at some point you start getting some of that data that you can use and what is that when you start to collect some of that data that's more useful, what does that, what does that reveal to you? You know, what do you come away with having learned from this process? Yeah, this, this really started to get interesting. So about five, six weeks into it, we started seeing some patterns. We started seeing the large, uh, textile manufacturers, big textile tier one companies, talk about the heavy metals a little bit, but they had this, this challenge around some waterproofing agents that were harder to tackle. And I made a note. And then we spoke to some of the oil and gas companies and we really hustled our way to go on site with them and spend half a day with their head of environmental remediation group. And they, they spent a lot of time with us on the heavy metals because they do have projects, but towards the end, they said, Oh, actually we have this, this other challenge, which is to do with the flame retardants from the oil and gas sites. And if you can, if you can come up with a problem with a solution for that, just call me and I'll get it the same day. I'll take it the same day. Uh, and we, we didn't really know what it was. We just, again, made a note, went back, then we went and talked to one of the big airports here in London, and they talked about this, these firefighting foam drills that they've had. And we're like, okay, like, tell us about it again, that test, like understand the market. And they, they talked about how they really can't get rid of this agent they use in the firefighting form. And they have to collect up all the water before they discharge it to treat first. And I was like, okay, just make a note of it. And then we were going through like, in these round tables, I remember like vividly at the basement of Imperial. And we just starting to see these kind of red threads. where maybe, maybe these reagents have something in common, like this side note, you know, the end of the conversation piece, uh, and we started looking at the bottom up chemistry of it, like the science, and there is commonality, there seems to be a fluoride bond. did to a carbon. And so we said, okay, you know, I wonder what that is. You know, we're used to it being called lots of things, halogenated, something organics, maybe, uh, weren't quite sure. And so we started, we did some bottom up research. And I think this is often overload, like you go and do your own sec, Secondary research as well as this primary, uh, and that was where this picture behind me comes from. So, so this thing is the Baikal Lake, the largest lake, uh, in the world by volume. It's in Siberia, and what they had found at that time, this is early 2016, was that there was a freshwater seal. Uh, that had started to accumulate some of these carbon fluorine bonded, uh, compounds in their liver. And just, I remember seeing this, it was very academic, nowhere near a newspaper, just academic papers. I remember thinking, wow, you know, like this is the largest volume of water. It's 1. 5 kilometers deep. There's no industry there. There's one factory in all of that, that, and it's a paper and pulp factory. It's not a big one. And so I, I just started then looking through, it came up in Arctic foxes as well. It came up in like polar chemistries building up in certain organs. And then, then once I saw that with the seals, I was like, shit, if this is the same chemistry in these different large industries, if it's gotten to that place, it cannot be, you know, the researchers with their Gore Tex clothing that's sort of shedding enough for the seal, because the seal really avoids human contact as well. Uh, so that the thesis was very early on, like just rip. Maybe, what if we have infiltrated the water cycle? What if it's gone out for the last many, many years with these big industries and it's actually infiltrated clouds and these big freshwater volumes we have? Wow, then I, yeah, then I started smelling like, it's like a heat seeking missile. We were like, wow, we went and talked to our mentor from this Climate Accelerator Program about our findings, about our customer discovery, and And he, he went and closed the door, this was at Imperial, and he said, shit kids, like, if this is real, you could have a massive opportunity ahead of you. Yeah. And the, now this is 2016, you're discovering this? And so this is pre Darkwater? Pre Darkwater. It's the year that the lawsuit happens. So while we're doing this customer discovery, the lawsuit got settled for And Henrik, just for the benefit of our listeners, can you just, you know, briefly outline, you know, describe what happened with Darkwater? Uh, yeah, it's a crazy case. So I'm a farm boy, I'm a countryside boy, so it rings close to home. Uh, there was basically a Teflon manufacturing plant where it discharged these, uh, carbon fluorine chemistries called PFAS for a long period of time. It creates some foam, uh, but there weren't really regulations around it. Uh, and it took a long time before the local farmers saw the cows getting ill and then say, maybe there's something wrong with the water. And then 15 years, 15, 16, 17 years of one lawyer trying to prove that the waters related to the disease. And then, uh, basically fighting his way to get a, the largest epidemiological study of the time conducted with the villagers who have been unwilling experimenters in this experiment to see the toxicity of of the PFAS chemicals, uh, and then. Basically that study showing a probable link, which is a very close to a proven link, probable link to six disease and those six diseases then being the basis for settlement, a large settlement, 670 million. Yeah, but it was wild. You know, the lawyer almost had a seizure because of the pressure. No, no salary, you know, for his deals for 10 plus years. Wow. And there was a movie, of course, with Mark Ruffalo and, uh, and that became very popular and we've had. Subsequent lawsuits against different companies, uh, since then. And this, so then this problem starts to crystallize and are you then starting to think, actually, this is what we need to be focusing on. We need to somehow be tuning whatever we're doing towards preventing this from getting into the water supply. Yeah, it's, it's that spot on. We, we had to go back to our thesis and say, Oh, we thought, you know, arsenic was the most toxic in water and heavy metals, but actually I need to add a new column to that toxicity versus contaminant bar. And it's way higher than the others. So we, we reject the entire company is, I guess it's typical to call it a pivot. It's one of the pivotal moments to pivot. So we, we pivoted into the PFAS space without making a big fuss about it actually. So I think that's one of the other, other things in our world. If you want to be the one who gets to be ahead of the curve, sometimes you pivot, sort of, not that we didn't talk about it. We told people we're doing these carbon fluorine chemistries. They didn't have a name yet. We called them like PFCs or something else. But we didn't bang the drum to say, Oh, PFAS is going to be the biggest thing ever. And everyone should be developing scientific things to tackle them. Was there at the time any. Legislation was, you know, you know, did it look like there was a legislative agenda for this stuff coming down the pipe at the time that you guys made your decision to pivot? There was some in the US, uh, but it was a health advisory, so it wasn't legally enforced. And, well, For the EU, there were some guidelines around reducing it, but those guidelines were like, nobody were taking them that seriously. There were lots of classifications in the EU, like, oh, we should have good river waters. And we've missed a goal so many times. Sure, sure. So let me, let me just recap real quick. You, you, in order to uncover and I guess fully flesh out the problem that you guys want to address, you engage in these face to face meetings, these 100 meetings. I guess, times two, with, uh, with companies in the market to, to understand the problems they're having. And we're calling that primary research, engaging directly with these kinds of companies, you're taking them through, your questioning gets sharper over time. You're also then engaging in additional research, which is, I guess, what we've called secondary research. And what kind of stuff are you doing? You know, what's the nature of that secondary research that you guys did? I think the interesting part there is like combining your own thesis with data you get from the market. And so if we had gone and asked the market, Oh, what do you want? They wouldn't have said what we were developing. We really had to go and look critically at what are some of the pitfalls for developing solutions into this space. Uh, and then also make our own thesis, like no one was banging the drum that PFAS had infiltrated the water cycle that, that took another seven years before it came out by the Swedes in 2023. Uh, we had to say, we think it could have infiltrated at least parts of the water cycle. It's sufficiently that we think there's going to be a market growing and increasing. And then for the, the treatment side, Oh my God, we had so many issues in the beginning because we, we learned from this kind of, uh, bottom up perspective that membranes, they can tackle PFAS. We had a membrane to begin with, uh, that's a, you know, excellent choice from an engineer's perspective. It's super fun. It's cool. It's a membrane. Uh, but the end users kept having challenges with them fouling and the pressure required. Uh, there's a lot of energy that goes into operating them, uh, and there's not a lot of infrastructure that's set up to operate membranes. Uh, it's quite a, a sort of complicated advanced treatment technology, uh. And so we, we learn from these scathing reviews where people would take an academic paper, pick it apart and say, well, there are all these issues with this academic paper. And we'd be like, Oh, that academic paper is quite similar to what we would publish if we used our current technology. And so we go and talk to those who would like pick apart the academic papers as well as read the reviews to then really say, okay. How can we overcome some of those tech pitfalls before we develop the technology? Okay. Before you developed The media that you have today, you were looking at this in the secondary research, uncovering, reading some of the comments to these academic papers to realize our, our idea, our hypothesis of a solution looks a lot like theirs. and they're ripping it apart. It doesn't work. So maybe we don't go down that line. And, and then you go and you have followup discussions with them to really boil it down and understand, I guess, the true nature of their company and how far they extend. And ultimately that, I guess, the combination of those two things, the primary and the secondary research, then you let have an impact on the development of your ultimate technology approach. But as you said, you didn't let it dictate it totally, because had you let the customer. You know, then you're just taking a customer order, and it gets back to that old Henry Ford quote, I'd ask the customer what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse. So you've got to, you know, I think that's where the innovation piece comes in. You've got to make that jump, understand the nature of the problem well enough, but then maybe think two or three moves ahead as to what might be required and take a punt. And also trying to combine the different worlds. So on one hand you have the industrial world in its own little bubble. On the other hand, you have the academic space and over here you have the, I don't know, the greens, the green piece and the government regulatory bodies. Trying to combine, what is the common thread? How can we weave these together? Um, and there are definitely issues like, I remember reading this review of, uh, adsorbent media for tackling surfactants, and PFAS is ultimately a surfactant. So I really went back to years and years, uh, of research within surfactants and, One of the big pitfalls was that it behaves non linearly. It's not just a linear behavior like an ion or a simple organic. It changes into this weird structure called a micelle, which is basically like a little round bubble where the polar bed is poking out towards the water and the tails go in towards the center. Uh, so it'd be like an oil droplet. And then after it gets that shape, it gets a new shape, completely third configuration Uh, it, it doesn't sort of neatly follow the rules of, uh, treatment. And so many of the papers that this reviewer had seen would just test in a static test, like in a basically little bottle or a little falcon tube. And that static test didn't sort of translate to the continuous flow at all. There was just no correlation between the performance. Okay. Okay. That's it. So thereby increasing the challenge for you. Yes. That's going to work in those, in those variable and almost unpredictable situations. Yeah. Um, how long did it take you to complete your research? And when did you know you were done? Yeah, that's a good question. So we thought we were done way before we were actually done. That's one lesson learned. So we went and we, we spent the first four years grant funded because we didn't want to raise venture funding until we knew what market and that we had some proof of concept. Yeah. for that market that we were going to go for. Uh, so in 2016, we really focused on PFAS only for the research. In 2019, we raised, uh, our first venture around a series seed based on having proof of concept. So we had superior data within a big mistake, a batch for better performance. So better kinetics. So we can capture it faster and better capacity. We can capture more of it. And then proof of concept, early proof of concept for also reusing our material. And those three things were really what we said, okay, that's the research done, mistake, mistake, by the way. Uh, it then took from 2019 to 2023 to get third party validated, uh, best in class performance for those three, uh, features. So, faster kinetics, better capacity and reusability, uh, that's a long time. So from 2019 to 2023, uh, it was not just, Oh, let's take it to a sort of, we went out in 2019. Again, I, Yeah. Not many people know this. We tested it with third parties and they said, Oh, it's not that good. And it wasn't because of the technology approach. It was because of other issues to do with our sort of, uh, yeah, well, our raw substrate that we were using. And so we had to rethink some of the extra parameters that are needed to succeed. In the beginning, we had just said, Oh, it's performance. There you go. It's done. Uh, but there's also stability. There's safety. There's manufacturability. Uh, and, and those come in and actually killed us while they extended the research period from 2019 to 2023. That's, that's interesting and, and unfortunately very common. Those metrics that you highlighted though, the faster kinetics, the being able to, uh, the, uh, the greater capacity, uh, and then the reusability, uh, the regeneration, how, where did you get those from? Yeah. Yeah. So we, we know the focus on those. That was, again, that was back from the combination of the, that was more to do with the secondary research, I would say. So it's really looking at how have people captured surfactants in the past, or how have they tackled other contaminants in water and what are the killer, the killer features that really feed into that calculation. Uh, for us, those three features all boiled into the total cost of ownership, which is basically because water is undervalued. And you can either try and bang your head against that wall or find technological advances that just fundamentally changes your total cost of, uh, ownership. So if you can make it a lot cheaper, that's how SpaceX is making space exploration cheaper by reusing rockets. You can just outperform your customers or your competitors. So that regeneration piece, that reusability piece. becomes fundamental, and we hear that a lot too, as an impact for the overall commercial proposition. The, um, how, when did customers, or potential customers, start taking it really seriously? Start looking at your proposition. really seriously. I would say in 2016, it was still early days. You had the oil and gas company was saying, Oh, we would like to get this. Then we developed something. And in 2019, I would say people started taking it much more seriously. Uh, the lawsuit had sort of settled. It had set off some considerations, uh, in the US market, especially. And so we had third party industrial companies come towards us. We had the largest environmental services company in North America, that's private, come to Europe looking for solutions. And they were looking for solutions for PFAS specifically, nothing else. Just that. Uh, and they, they luckily came to Imperial, Serendipity, I guess you can say, and we, we became their first non US investment, even though they've invested for 90 plus years. in material science. Uh, right. And so they were looking seriously and they were one of the front runners. Uh, took a while then from that point to us getting the third party validation, which really, this was another lesson that internally we had to be comfortable that we're going to ship out product. And outperform competitors, not just ship out product and hope we get some data and, you know, that's going to be valuable and maybe it will work and, or maybe it won't, because that can really damage your reputation. Yeah, so you had to, you had to know that it was going to be much better than what was out there already. For that water matrix, yes. That's interesting. How, how competitive was it? Uh, in the beginning, uh, you were up against the big incumbents. So people would have a knee jerk response to just take some activated carbon, which is literally carbon derived product. and dump it in the tank and then call it job done, uh, or they would take the, uh, incumbent, uh, petroleum derived ion exchange, uh, and use it from the large, uh, tier one companies. Uh, this, this was a repurposed product. So it's what the water industry has done for a long time. They see a problem, take something off the shelf, repurpose it for this thing. hope that it works after some testing, or that at least one of the 5 10 products on the shelf will work for it, and then just sell that product. Don't develop something new, just use something that's getting repurposed. A bit like how you repurpose drugs that are approved in the pharma space. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If, as you look back, and we come forward to the present day, if you were to set up a new company and do it all over again, what would you do differently? Yeah, I love that question. Uh, I sometimes think of me as building small companies within a larger company with what we're doing now. Um, so I think I would start with the, this kind of, Combined primary and secondary research. So go and talk to the customers. Don't take what they say as like the Holy Grail. Uh, they're not gonna get everything right. And they're not going to suggest the best solution, but talk to them about the problem state, uh, the problem state statement. Just really hone in. Like, what does their day look like? What bothers them? What's the friction? What's the real issues they have? Is it that they're getting pressure from their customers, from regulators, from others? What happens? And then, take that, but also take a step back. Uh, we, we sort of need, needed to combine that secondary research to really get our insights. Uh, and that's, maybe it's because I'm leaning into my nerdy side as well. Like, I, I love a super academic paper, and then trying to draw the link to what a customer just said, who's an operator, who's never seen that academic paper. I would combine that with a sort of stage approach. We now call it something like a stage state. It's not super, uh, large corporate, but there are some, some overlaps to, you know, large corporates can be quite good at adding structure to what, what is the search process. I think it's any sort of new scientific endeavor is really a search process. where you're going around like a heat seeking missile trying to find the problem statement and then trying to find the tech fit with something you have capability to develop. Would you, would you set up that process or set out on that process before you even had technology? I would set up on some, some of it before I had technology developed for it. It gets quite theoretical at that point because it's like everything I do now is water related and we have some tech stack. So maybe, Alternatively, maybe I would work with an academic group who have developed some push. There's a lot of tech push out there, and frankly, a lot of it has a lot of potential, but it's not getting out to the taxpayers who have funded that research. And so you could sort of stand on the shoulders of giants if you tap into some of that technology that's already been developed. And then see if you want to solve within that problem space. And in your view, what's preventing that, what's preventing the value from being realized there? Are they not engaging in this kind of process that you've just outlined? The primary and the secondary research, is that just not happening? I think the big, people would say different things. In the UK, people always say it's money. But for me, honestly, it's more to do with talent. It's, it's this kind of, do we have the people who are interested in making that leap and do we provide them the tools and the systems and the processes for, for learning that skill? Uh, it's very different. Now the, the academic world, you need to get measured by your metrics on your papers and like, how collaborations? This is ambiguous. There's a search phase to it. It's not very prestigious in the beginning. People ask you what you do and you're like, uh, you know, I work as a tutor on the side because I don't get any money from this thing I'm trying to commercialize. And they're like, okay, why don't you take a job, you know, that's paid and you work less. So it's a weird gap in the market, in my view. Uh, there's a, uh, an upscaling and maturing of the ecosystem where, you know, now people can say, Oh, I'm a founder and in, in some parts of the UK, people say, Oh, all right, of course you're scrappy right now. But ten years ago, you would say you're a founder and people would be like, a founder of what? Or like, what does that mean? We don't have that maturity yet of the ecosystem. And that skill perhaps as a, as a, as a leader or the management skill to understand what's required at that very early stage, which is, as you've just so well, so beautifully articulated. getting out there and speaking to people. What I find so interesting is that the answers didn't come from the obvious questions you were asking. Not that your questions were obvious. I'm sure they were sophisticated. They almost count, they almost came about from the asides. The walk back from the office to the door, you know, or the, let's grab a coffee. Oh shit, man, if you could do something about PFAS, Christ. That's such a, that's such an ache for us. We're, we're, we're really struggling with those foams over there. If you got, if you know anyone who's doing that, let us know. The, the, you know, those kinds of, you know, off the cuff remarks, almost forgotten remarks can often be where so much of the gold is. Mm. And that's, again, it's, it's genuine data. It's not something you were forced. It was just, you've created a bit of a space, had a bit of a discussion and then they're like, okay, oh, by the way, I'll head off now. But if you could do that thing, call me. Yeah. Because I fucking need that thing. My boss is breathing down my neck. Exactly. Exactly. One last question, Henrik, something I'm curious about. The, the nature of the problem. I mentioned at the outset of our discussion that I've always been impressed with the. most of the quality of the problem that you're solving. And, you know, we have a situation where, because today of EU legislation and US legislation, which is now banning PFAS over the next two or three years in massive numbers. So companies, unless they want to be sued or fined, have to do something about this now, they have to. And so that makes your market. Thank you. You go to industrial companies and you mentioned to them, if you don't do this, you guys are going to be in trouble. Uh, they're listening and for novel technology, new platforms, new ways of doing things. It's very difficult to get listened to by big corporates, but when the problem is acute enough, when it hurts enough, when it acts as a threat, companies start listening. Is that your experience? Yeah, I think it's really honing in on that. difference between nice to have and must have. And I think part of it is also being humble enough around not servicing all of the must haves. In this space, it's very easy to get drawn in by the customer and being like, Oh, if you must have water treatment, I'll become a water treatment solution provider. I'll do everything for you. I'll do pipes and pumps and valves. It's so exciting. But it's kind of, it's being honest about what can you be the best in the world at. And yeah, we could learn how to operate a water treatment vessel, okay, but people have spent 70 years developing that with weapons grade engineering, really done a lot of effort on it. And so it's, it's being sort of looking yourself in the mirror and being, okay, they will probably be able to do quite well over there. And secondly, it's also quite commoditized. It's very much just built. competing on price. Uh, and so we had to take a step back and say, okay, what can we be the best in the world at? And it turned out to be quite niche. It's tackling these very specific contaminants in water with new materials for it, not just an off the shelf product. Uh, that was a bit of hard work and some of the team wanted to do the full solution. So we had to have difficult conversations around, okay, If you want to do full solutions, we, we love you as an employee. We love you as like a team member, but maybe you should go and do it somewhere else. And those difficult conversations, people often shy away from, and you end up with a company who's trying to do everything because you don't want to have that uncomfortable. Actually, we maybe need to break up and, and sort of. Go different, uh, come go to different companies that I had to do that for some of the team still, still good terms now, but it was not an easy time. My wife remembers it. She was like, well, all the tech issues, you're okay. But those kind of uncomfortable conversations with people in the trenches that you care a lot about, that's where you really have to pull yourself in and stand up. And focus though. And ultimately focus. Man, because, you know, that's what it's about. And I guess it gets back to, why do you know, why do we exist? Why does this come to exist? And if we're not, you know, we're, you know, if we exist to solve this problem, then we must be ruthless or we must do what it takes at least to solve the problem and everyone must be committed to solving the problem. And that means we're not going to solve a lot of other problems that are worthy, but we're not going to solve them because we're just going to solve this one. They're cool problems, but they're not our problems. It's that kind of good to great book reference where you sit down with the team, draw the hedgehog of like, what can we be the best at? Like what's needed from the market? And then I remember leaving that session being like, shit, I'm going to have to talk to three of my team members. One wants to do only this kind of technology, which is not what we're going to stick to. One wants to be a water solution provider. That's not what we're going to stick to. And I had to sort of help them get on to, to another, another startup or another company. Yeah. Yeah. Henrik, this has been super interesting and, uh, I've learned a lot. Um, I, uh, I always do when we speak. So thank you so much for, for joining me today. Ah, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me, Chris. You've been listening to the Lab to Market Leadership Podcast, brought to you by Deep Tech Leaders. This podcast has been produced by Beauxhaus. You can find out more about us on LinkedIn, Spotify, apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.