hephaistos.bio Grabs €161K as Designer-Enzyme Race Heats Up

hephaistos.bio, a Zurich biotech designing custom enzymes for industry, has won CHF 150,000 (about €161,000) from Venture Kick’s startup funding program. The cash is meant to push the company from a lab project toward a business that sells tailor-made biological catalysts to pharmaceutical and fine-chemical makers. On its own, it is a rounding error in venture terms.

What makes the grant worth a second look is the company it now keeps. Across Europe in the past few weeks, money has started moving fast into the exact thing hephaistos.bio is building: enzymes drawn up by software rather than hunted for in nature.

A CHF 150,000 Grant Lands in a Crowded Race

Venture Kick runs a staged program that backs Swiss research spin-offs in three rounds, topping out at CHF 150,000. Reaching that final tier means a panel of investors and entrepreneurs has signed off on the team more than once. For an early venture with no product revenue, that validation often matters more than the cheque itself.

The money is earmarked for practical steps rather than a moonshot. hephaistos.bio plans to run follow-up enzyme design campaigns for industrial partners, expand its laboratory automation, and make its first hires beyond the founding team. Each of those is a move toward proving the platform works outside a single demonstration.

Chief executive Lukas Radtke framed the award as a turning point for the venture.

Venture Kick is a catalyst for industrial innovation. 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.

That last line is the pitch in a sentence. The company is not selling a cheaper version of an existing enzyme; it is targeting reactions where no good biological catalyst exists yet.

What hephaistos.bio Builds, and for Whom

Most enzymes used in manufacturing today were either found in microbes or tweaked by trial and error. hephaistos.bio takes a different route, stitching together computational biology, chemistry, machine learning, and structural biology into one design pipeline. The goal is to draw up a protein catalyst tuned to a specific industrial reaction, then build it.

The payoff, in theory, is access to chemistry that conventional methods handle badly. Swapping a metal catalyst or a multi-step synthesis for a single designed enzyme can strip out solvents, heat, and waste. That is the sustainability argument. The resilience argument is that a European maker can produce its own catalyst rather than depend on a long, fragile supply chain.

The founding team spreads across the disciplines the work demands:

• Lukas Radtke, chief executive, leading strategy and fundraising
• Lucas Merlicek, chief technology officer, over the design platform
• Jannik Neumann, head of operations
• Moritz Ullhofen, head of lab
• Ilya Schneider, head of business development

The early commercial proof point is a pilot with SpiroChem, a Swiss contract research organisation (CRO, a firm that runs chemistry and biology work for other companies). A CRO partner gives hephaistos.bio a way to test designed enzymes against real client problems before it ever has to build its own factory.

The Designer-Enzyme Funding Wave Building Across Europe

The Swiss grant did not arrive in a vacuum. Within roughly the same window, two UK rivals closed seed rounds many times larger, all of them chasing the same idea that artificial intelligence (AI) can design better industrial enzymes than nature handed down.

Imperagen’s Quantum Bet

Imperagen, a 2021 spin-out from the University of Manchester’s biotechnology institute, raised **£5 million** to combine quantum physics, AI modelling, and heavily automated labs. The company says its closed-loop system has lifted enzyme productivity by factors of 677 and 572 across just five design rounds, the kind of jump that sells a platform story to investors.

Scindo’s Plastics Angle

Scindo, founded in 2020, banked a £4 million (about $5.4 million) round to scale its enzyme discovery platform, co-led by Kadmos Capital and Clay Capital. Its enzymes target reactions that are awkward for traditional chemistry, including the carbon bond cleavages needed to break down stubborn molecules such as plastics.

The pattern is hard to miss once you line the three up. Estonia’s ÄIO, which recently raised €1.2 million for wood-based sustainable fats, fits the same European appetite for biology that replaces petrochemical inputs.

Why Europe Is Paying to Reshore Its Chemistry

The timing rewards anyone who reads policy. In May 2026, the EU Council and Parliament reached a provisional deal on the Critical Medicines Act, a law built to cut Europe’s reliance on foreign suppliers of essential drugs and their ingredients.

The dependence it targets is stark. EU figures show that about **80%** of imported pharmaceutical ingredients come from just five countries, with China alone accounting for roughly 45% of the total. More than half of recent critical-medicine shortages traced back to manufacturing problems, many of them far from Europe.

That is where designed enzymes fit the political moment. The bloc’s plan to secure critical medicine supply leans on producing more active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs, the molecules that make a drug work) inside Europe, backed by billions in onshoring support. European APIs cost more than Asian equivalents, often 15% to 25% more. A catalyst that strips steps and waste out of a synthesis is one of the few levers that can narrow that gap without a subsidy.

The Numbers Behind the Biocatalysis Pitch

The case for biocatalysis rests on a handful of figures that show up again and again in the field, and Venture Kick cited the headline savings when it backed hephaistos.bio.

• Up to 30% lower manufacturing costs from switching to enzyme-based routes
• Up to 50% lower carbon dioxide emissions versus conventional chemistry
• Over 40% of new chemical entities approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) now use biocatalytic synthesis at some stage

The market behind those numbers is still small but growing. One industry forecast puts the global biocatalysis market on a path from $642 million in 2025 to roughly $1.2 billion by 2035. Pharmaceuticals and biotechnology already make up the largest slice of demand, which is why a Swiss team is aiming straight at drug makers rather than commodity chemicals.

Where the Swiss Startup Sits in the Pack

Read against its peers, hephaistos.bio is the smallest and least-funded name in a race it helped define. Its UK rivals are operating with seed rounds worth tens of times its grant, longer track records, and labs already humming with automation. Money buys design cycles, and design cycles buy the data that trains the next model.

Yet the Swiss team has two things that money cannot instantly replicate: a live industrial pilot with a real CRO, and a focus on the pharmaceutical reactions that the new European policy is built to protect. A targeted win for a drug maker is worth more in this market than a broad platform with no anchor customer. Other European deep-tech raises, from biomaterials ventures like Mykor’s £4 million for mycelium panels to enzyme players, show investors rewarding exactly that kind of narrow, provable application.

The grant funds the next set of design campaigns. Those campaigns are the test.

If hephaistos.bio turns its SpiroChem pilot into a paying pharmaceutical contract before the cash runs low, the €161,000 will read as the cheap entry ticket to a market the Critical Medicines Act is busy enlarging. If the design platform stalls against better-funded rivals, the same grant will read as a polite Swiss send-off into a race that had already left the gate.