A St. Louis Park-based startup has received about $1.2 million to advance its technology that transforms simple sugars to bio-derived plastics.
The early-stage company, Valerian Materials, alongside its project team members, the National Corn-to-Ethanol Research Center, the University of Minnesota and Scientific Bioprocessing, received the federally funded grant through St. Paul-based BioMade, a U.S. Department of Defense-sponsored manufacturing innovation institute.
Eight other teams, including one with Wayzata-based Cargill Inc., also received funds for various projects, totaling $20.6 million, BioMade announced in a press release and during a biotechnology and biomanufacturing summit at the White House last week.
Launched in 2021, BioMade is an independent nonprofit established by the DoD to advance new biotechnology products from the lab to the market, according to the nonprofit’s description. Last year, the nonprofit funded another Minnesota-based startup, General Probiotics, which develops advanced probiotics.
BioMade's mission is "perfectly aligned" with the work of Valerian Materials, Co-founder Marc Hillmyer, who is also director of the university’s National Science Foundation Center for Sustainable Polymers, told the Business Journal.
Valerian Materials, a startup spun off from the university’s Venture Center in 2016, centers on the biosynthesis and use of a sugar-derived material called betamethylvalerolactone (BMVL.) Through a chemical process, it becomes a polymer with properties similar to that of petroleum-based products currently on the market, according to the company’s website. Such polymer products include plastics, foams, elastomers and adhesives.
Valerian Materials' bio-based products can be chemically recycled and degrade in the environment, the company says.
The grant to Valerian Materials and its project partners totals about $1.2 million, CEO Mike Arbeiter told the Business Journal. The project focuses on optimizing BMVL’s fermentation and downstream processing, according to a description on BioMade.
The project, with Valerian Materials as its lead, runs for 24 months and started at the beginning of this month, Arbeiter said.
Since its founding, Valerian Materials has operated primarily as a research and development company, Arbeiter said. But the project and grant will help the company take its technology to market, the CEO said.
“The opportunity to be a part of this process with BioMade and the receipt of the grant really puts us in a position to work with some very significant research and development institutes that will help us to take the material to where we need to go, and in taking it ... into full commercialization and large-scale manufacturing,” he said.
Valerian Materials intends to bring its product to market in 2024, Arbeiter said.
Efforts in sustainability have become increasingly important to people, meaning Valerian Materials' technology is coming to market at the right time, Arbeiter added. The technology "will certainly change how people look at what one can do with plastics," he said.
