ETH Spin-off Hephaistos Raises €161K to Design Custom Enzymes and Reshore Production to Europe

Advancing to the second stage of Venture Kick signals that the startup has moved past pure R&D. According to ETH’s Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE), hitting that milestone, together with signing the SpiroChem pilot, marks “the transition from lab-scale innovation to real-world industrial application and proving the need for custom-designed biocatalysts for industrial chemical synthesis” .

How the Enzyme-Design Engine Works

The startup’s platform fuses computational biology, chemistry, machine learning, and structural biology into a single pipeline for de novo enzyme design . Instead of tweaking natural enzymes, hephaistos.bio builds new-to-nature proteins tailored to a specific chemical reaction. The company describes a three-part stack: state-of-the-art protein engineering tools and ML algorithms housed in a custom-built computational pipeline; purpose-driven enzyme designs created from scratch; and an end-to-end service that moves from computational design straight to wet-lab validation .

The practical payoff is straightforward: replacing reactions that today require high temperatures, toxic solvents, or heavy-metal catalysts with aqueous, ambient-pressure, enzymatic alternatives . That directly reduces carbon footprint, cuts hazardous waste streams, and—crucially for the pharmaceutical industry—shortens the cost of making complex APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients).

The SpiroChem Pilot: A Late-Stage Drug in the Crosshairs

hephaistos.bio’s first industrial pilot is with SpiroChem AG, a well-regarded Swiss contract research organization (CRO) with deep expertise in high-throughput experimentation and computational chemistry . The pilot targets a late-stage pharmaceutical compound class—the kind of molecule where a single challenging transformation locks a manufacturer into a harsh synthetic route .
SpiroChem brings its automated high-throughput platform to the table, capable of running dozens to hundreds of parallel experiments under precisely controlled conditions. That lets the partners rapidly screen and validate the custom-designed enzyme’s performance on real substrates, cutting the feedback loop between design and iteration . The combination—hephaistos.bio designing enzymes computationally and SpiroChem screening them experimentally—is what the D-BSSE calls the “breakthrough” that proves the model works outside the university lab .

Reshoring—and Why It Matters

Beyond the one drug compound, hephaistos.bio has a larger strategic ambition: reshore enzyme production to Europe. Today, many pharmaceutical intermediates and API-building blocks flow through Asian supply chains . Those chains create dependencies, long lead-times, and carbon-heavy logistics. By enabling local, enzyme-driven manufacturing, the startup envisions European pharma players making complex molecules closer to home, with lower environmental overhead and greater supply-chain resilience .

The Venture Kick injection won’t single-handedly build that supply chain—it is seed-stage money targeted at proving the core technology in an industrial setting. However, it gives the team the runway to demonstrate that a de novo-designed enzyme can do a real industrial job, which opens the door for larger investment rounds and partnerships with chemical manufacturers. Cofounder and Head of Business Development Ilya Schneider has pointed out that finding an investment partner is now the team’s main focus, as they move from technical credibility to scalable operations .

What Comes Next

The immediate milestone is completing the SpiroChem pilot and generating data that shows a commercial-grade biocatalyst can replace a legacy chemical route. Success there would validate the platform for other compound classes and de‑risk the value proposition for manufacturers. With the Venture Kick stage‑2 capital in hand, hephaistos.bio sits at the classic deep-tech inflection point where scientific validity meets industrial traction—and it is betting that purpose-built enzymes are the fastest route to cleaner chemistry.