Swiss Biotech Startup hephaistos.bio Secures €161K Funding

Traditional chemical production often relies on energy-intensive processes that generate significant emissions and create dependencies on vulnerable global supply chains.

While enzymes can offer a more sustainable alternative reducing manufacturing costs and environmental impact many industrially important reactions, particularly in pharmaceuticals, still lack suitable biocatalysts.

Founded by Lukas Radtke (CEO), Lucas Merlicek (CTO), Jannik Neumann (Head of Operations), Moritz Ullhofen (Head of Lab), and Ilya Schneider (Head of Business Development), hephaistos.bio is addressing this challenge by combining computational biology, chemistry, structural biology, and machine learning to design custom protein catalysts tailored to specific industrial applications.

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The company's end-to-end enzyme engineering platform creates biocatalysts for chemical reactions that are difficult or impossible to perform efficiently using existing solutions. By enabling more efficient manufacturing processes, the technology aims to help pharmaceutical and fine chemical companies improve sustainability, strengthen supply-chain resilience, and reduce production costs.

hephaistos.bio is already demonstrating the potential of its platform through an industrial pilot project with Swiss contract research organisation SpiroChem. Building on this early commercial traction, the startup plans to support efforts to reshore pharmaceutical and chemical production to Europe by providing more competitive and sustainable manufacturing solutions.

The Venture Kick funding will be used to advance additional enzyme design campaigns, expand laboratory automation capabilities and support the company's first hires. As it scales, hephaistos.bio aims to deepen collaborations with industrial partners seeking economically viable and environmentally responsible alternatives to conventional chemical manufacturing.

“Venture Kick is a catalyst for industrial innovation,” highlights CEO Lukas Radtke. “The support and funding pushed us to transition from being a research project towards a business, providing the momentum required to deploy our custom enzymes where traditional chemistry has failed for years.”