Starting broad, finding focus

After I finished my PhD, my fascination with bioengineering led me to join Cemvita as CTO. Cemvita is a company trying to transform heavy industry through synthetic biology. They have various groups working on different solutions, including a biomining group based in Denver. The board asked me to step in and lead this division, where we explored various microbial applications across the mining process. Crucially, I saw that we had to narrow down our focus. Microbes had applications across the board—in lithium extraction, nickel laterites, and copper. The problem is that the industry doesn’t reward future potential, so there was no point in us becoming another platform that could spin off various products. 

The best advice someone gave me was: cash is king, focus is queen. So I got our team to find an urgent problem to solve now. Where could we have an immediate impact on industry and the energy transition—not in ten years, but right now? Calling back to that moment in the pub in Edinburgh, we landed on copper, namely, finding ways to use microbes to extract it far more efficiently. 

So like that, we went from five products to one product, and spun out as an independent company: Endolith. And microbes are just one piece of the puzzle. We’ve also built a novel biointelligence platform—part biology, part machine learning—designed to extract more from less and adapt in real time.. For the mining industry, we’re already seeing proof, validated through testing with BHP’s Think & Act Differently (TAD) program, that Endolith’s microbes can meaningfully boost copper recovery from low-grade ores and waste, revealing new value in material previously considered uneconomic.

Endolith today, and the next five years

As a CEO, I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing a number of exciting milestones. These range from the big moments—closing our $5M seed round last year—to the quiet ones, like walking into the lab and seeing our team huddled around a whiteboard, solving hard problems together.

The team I’ve helped assemble is undoubtedly our greatest asset, and has been one of the most important things I’ve had to do as CEO. In the early days, I was terrible at this: at first, I hired people who thought like me, because I thought that’s what made a good team. Turns out, I needed the opposite. Learning to lead people who challenge me has been just as humbling as any scientific breakthrough. I see a lot of scientists with this same approach—” I’m not a people person”. But neither was I, and I made it something I had to study like any other scientific feature. You truly cannot underestimate how instrumental this is to your success. 

This year, our team is all-in on field validation and commercial deployment. We’re finally taking the technology out of the lab, launching our first proofs-of-concept with some of the world’s largest mining companies, and laying the groundwork for full-scale adoption. 

In 3 to 5 years, every major mining company will be using some form of biological intelligence in extraction,: and if we’re successful in proving our ability to do this, Endolith will be at the forefront of this transition. 

Beyond this, there’s an even bigger picture. That question we mulled over in a pub in Edinburgh—what single resource could shape the future of humanity—still drives us. What started as a wild idea over drinks has become a platform that could transform how we value, recover, and reuse Earth’s most essential materials.

Microbes don’t just belong in mining: you can apply them to any process, whether it’s recovering metals from e-waste, extracting rare earth elements from discarded batteries, or even remediating industrial wastewater where you’re trying to extract more value out of waste material. If we succeed, one day you’ll walk through a copper mine that looks more like a biotech lab. And the waste piles? They’ll be our next harvest. Endolith can be a fundamental component of the material value chain.