🏭 The Column: September 12, 2025

Good morning. Today I’m just covering Cascade Bio because it’s no longer and everyday thing that a startup secures more funding (unless, of course, your startup is doing something related to AI).

Cascade closed their seed round

Most large-scale chemical production still relies on traditional metal catalysts, but at the high-value end of the chain—in fragrances, flavors, and pharmaceuticals—you’ll find nature’s catalyst in use: enzymes. Their appeal is clear: near-perfect selectivity under mild conditions. The drawback is cost. Enzymes are expensive to design, produce, and stabilize, which is why they usually show up in two places: inside cells, where metabolic pathways churn out products like citric acid from sugar, or outside cells, immobilized on a solid support to make a reusable biocatalyst.

Immobilization is the more interesting of the two. Once an enzyme is fixed to a support, it can be reused across many cycles, which makes it behave more like a catalyst than a consumable. That shifts costs toward CapEx instead of OpEx and avoids the inefficiency of moving excess water through the product stream.

The problem is that immobilization is hard. Most enzymes can’t be stabilized effectively, and even when they can, performance tends to collapse outside of narrow temperature or pH windows. That’s why only a handful of robust enzymes have made it into industrial use, with Novozymes’ 435 lipase (which is widely used in the flavor and fragrance industry) being the classic example.

Cascade Bio is trying to expand that set. And to date, they’ve proven that they’re new polymeric supports can improve enzyme stability on over 30 different enzymes—which means that if the price is right, it’s likely that they’ll be able to convert customers using existing biocatalysts (like Novozymes 435) to a Cascade equivalent. (Tony has a good write up that includes some of Cascade’s data over here!)

I’m writing about them today because I’m happy to see that they raised a $2.8 million seed round (in this economy??) and secured another $3.2 million in non-dilutive funding to move from lab to pilot scale. My hope is that immobilization shifts from a fragile, case-specific exercise to something closer to a systematic design problem: engineer the enzyme, match it with a suitable polymer, and run it at scale. Time will tell! [LINK]

Other Things Happened:

DuPont is selling their Aramids Business (Kevlar and Nomex) to Arclin at a $1.8bn valuation. Lanxess is going to start making rubber processing promoters at its site in Goose Creek, South Carolina. Ingevity is selling their South Carolina crude tall oil refinery to Mainstream Pine Products. Clariant is going to supply the catalyst for the world’s largest electric steam methane reformer. Ecovyst is selling its advanced materials and catalyst business to Technip Energies. USA BioEnergy is planning to use Johnson Matthey and Honeywell’s technology to make synthetic paraffinic kerosene (SPK) at its Bon Wier, Texas site. Symrise just started up a new bio-based pentylene glycol unit at their site in Granada, Spain. Metsa is capturing carbon at one of its pulp mills in Finland.