£4 million. That is the seed round Scindo, a London-based biotech startup, raised to build enzymes with AI. The round was co-led by Kadmos Capital and Clay Capital, with participation from PINC, the venture arm of food giant Paulig.
Scindo's platform combines proprietary experimental data with machine learning models to design enzymes, proteins that catalyze chemical reactions, for industrial applications. The company targets a shift that has been slow: replacing petroleum-based ingredients in flavours, fragrances, cosmetics, and specialty chemicals with bio-based alternatives made possible by engineered enzymes.
Enzymes are not new to industry. They have been used in detergents, food processing, and biofuel production for decades. What is new is the ability to design them from scratch using AI. As we wrote yesterday, $347 million is flowing into AI protein design platforms, and the field is moving from academic labs to commercial deployment.
Scindo, founded in 2020 by Gustaf Hemberg, Ben Davis, and Juliet Sword, has built a full-stack platform that maps enzyme functions that are difficult to achieve with traditional chemistry, particularly C–H activations and C–C bond cleavages. These are the molecular transformations needed to degrade stubborn molecules or synthesise complex natural-product-like ingredients without petrochemical feedstocks.
The company is not alone. Manchester-based Imperagen raised £5 million in May for a platform that combines quantum physics simulations with AI and automated wet labs. Lithuanian startup Biomatter raised €6.5 million in 2024 for its generative AI enzyme design platform and has since partnered with Thermo Fisher Scientific, BASF, and Kirin. Swiss rival Cradle has partnered with Novonesis, Bayer, and Lundbeck.
What connects them: a shared thesis that the $7 trillion global chemicals industry is ready for a biological rewrite, and that AI is the tool to make it happen. Screening natural enzymes and mutating them in the lab takes months or years per candidate. The new approach models millions of variants in silico, tests hundreds in automated labs, and feeds the results back into the model. Imperagen reports 500-fold improvements in enzyme performance over five cycles. Scindo works toward similar metrics with a focus on commercial ingredients rather than industrial enzymes.
The investment from PINC signals that the food and beverage industry sees the potential. Paulig's venture arm has a track record of backing early-stage biology startups. The thesis is that clean-label, bio-based ingredients will command a premium as regulation tightens around petroleum-derived chemicals and consumer demand shifts toward natural products.
The risk is timing. Enzyme engineering has promised a bio-based industrial revolution for two decades, and the economics have not always closed. AI compresses the design cycle from years to weeks. The cost of gene synthesis and high-throughput screening has fallen by an order of magnitude. Whether that is enough to displace incumbent petrochemical supply chains at scale remains the open question. The capital flowing into the field suggests a growing conviction that it will.
