Rebel Bios: A Serial Entrepreneur’s Using Waste for Climate Change & Redemption
Fail, fail, fail again. Fail to learn and grow. Hailing from, and based in São Paulo Puterman, Brazil, Paulo has ebbed and waned between the US and Europe. The road to London, as the founder of CorNatural, has not been a direct one. He has dabbled in circus, dance, theatre, music, to name a few outlets. It is this ability to move outside of his comfort zone and try his hand in all manner of fields which make him a great candidate for the entrepreneurial world, a world which can change dramatically and be unforgiving. It is no surprise then he is a serial entrepreneur, and CorNatural isn’t his first company.
“I was very worried about the impact of innovation on society — how innovation creates jobs and ushers in different perspectives, leading to the creative destruction of important practices and sectors,” he explained. He took a break from his studies to form an Internet consultancy company that explored the effect of the Internet on the music industry. Of the experience, he said, “You cannot have innovation if you don’t use the entrepreneurial side of the society. At that point, my life was all theory and no practice.” In 2000, at the height of the technology bubble, Paulo sold his company to an American subsidiary of J. P. Morgan. “After I sold the Internet company, I began to invest in cultural projects in Brazil,” explained Paulo.
Paulo returned to the university and began researching ways in which private enterprises could have a positive effect on society: “I started a PhD in biotechnology, and I concluded that the best way to add value to society would be to establish a biomass energy plant. I studied what would be the best biomass for use in a power plant and discovered the answer:
elephant grass — it remains viable during the drought season and grows twice as large as its nearest relative, sugar cane, which is the traditional biomass feedstock used in Brazil.” What resulted was his brainchild Sykué Bioenergya2 (Sykué means “life” in Nhengatu, an indigenous Brazilian language from the Amazons). He saw the opportunity: the Brazilian Electricity Sector. As of 2011, Brazil boasted the seventh-largest economy in the world, but Brazil’s electrical system was particularly vulnerable to droughts and seasonal shortages when water reservoir levels were low. Sykué is still in operation in Brazil today.
Starting at the moon
His first memory of discovering science was hearing of the moon landing. For those of you who don’t know JFK’s iconic Rice University Moon Speech, here’s a tidbit, “But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away, a giant rocket … made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, … — and do all this, and do it right, and do it first, before this decade is out — then we must be bold.”
For Paulo, this philosophy hits close to home. He wants to create a sustainable business building on emerging scientific breakthroughs. To do this, with technology that does not yet exist (until he builds it) his company must be indeed bold.
He does not believe in just navigating through convictions but wants to take curiosity and turn it into revolution. It was curiosity that led him to science, and the motivation that led him from academia to entrepreneurship. What he see’s as the next moon landing moment that will define our future, is how we will deal with climate change.
Paulo, “Best case scenario, we understand how to deal with climate change because at the moment we don’t, not fully. We need to understand the theory and practice of engineering the climate, otherwise, the future does not look promising.”
To make an impact on climate change he has turned to the current industrial practices at bioethanol mills and deconstructed how they can be cleaned up.
Waste, Yeast and a Cleaner World
Bioethanol mills generate low-value waste that is often sold at low costs or, even worse, is disposed of at great costs to the producer. CorNatural is synthetically re-engineering the genome of yeast to create microbial factories to purify this waste into high-value chemicals such as carotenoids, molecules commonly used in food, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics.
“I have been dealing with residues and wastes for a long time. Originally, I was trying to harvest energy from waste. From this focus, we migrated to generating products from waste. ” Paulo tells us. “When I met Rodrigo (his start-up partner) through common scientific interests. We met online — I read some of his articles and we started exchanging information. I was working with yeast and he was working on engineering yeast to generate products .” And a dream became a reality. “There is not enough knowledge at the intersection of evolution and engineering — I think this is where the field will develop in the future.” Now Paulo is in London pushing forward CorNatural forward and playing a part in developing the future.
CorNatural joined the RebelBio portfolio in our VIII program. Check out who the other nine were. And find out how the heart of a musician has turned to save lives from hospital-acquired infections in our latest Rebel Bio here.
By Susannah Williams
You have the science, but not yet the business case? — Let’s talk!
