How Two Young Scientists Built A $250 Million Business Using Yeast To Clean Up Wastewater

long-standing poker game with a group of University of Texas Southwestern medical students in Dallas brought Gaurab Chakrabarti and Sean Hunt together. Wenly Ruan, Chakrabarti’s dissection lab partner and Hunt’s then-girlfriend , was the link. But soon Chakrabarti, an M.D./Ph.D. candidate researching a drug candidate for pancreatic cancer, and Hunt, a graduate student in chemical engineering at MIT, were geeking out over science.

Its revenue reached $12 million last year, largely from more than 30 mostly Texas-based energy and industrial customers that use its wastewater treatment product. Chakrabarti and Hunt—alumni of the Forbes Under 30 class of 2017—expect revenue to surpass $30 million this year, though the company is not yet profitable as it spends heavily to expand.

By September 2018, Solugen was doing so well that it needed a bigger space and, with a $19 million funding round in the works, had the cash to cover expansion. On the Loopnet commercial real estate site, Hunt scoured the Houston area for options. A half hour later, he was touring a decommissioned chemical manufacturing plant that had been used to turn oil into plastics, with Chakrabarti’s father, Gopendu, a chemical engineer and entrepreneur.

Unlike phosphates, such as hydroxyethylidene diphosphonic acid, or HEDP, there are also environmental advantages. The process of making one ton of Solugen’s wastewater treatment sequesters the equivalent of 1.35 tons of carbon dioxide, versus 3 tons emitted for HEDP, according to a report from Life Cycle Analysis. That’s an advantage for companies evaluated by governments and investors on environmental impact.

Trunk-load to truckload: In its early days, Solugen’s cofounders carried 5-gallon jugs to customers in their Subaru. Today, they produce enough for tanker trucks.During the pandemic, Solugen also began producing hand sanitizer by combining its hydrogen peroxide with alcohol from a local ethanol facility. The company produced more than 100,000 gallons, most of which it donated to local healthcare facilities facing shortages with the help of the nonprofit group Operation USA.

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