The London-based startup Epoch Biodesign has raised £9 million ($12 9 million) to push its recycled nylon 6.6 toward widespread use. The round brings total funding to more than $50 million, including the £18.3 million Series A funding it secured last year.
The backing comes from a mix of strategic and climate-focused investors, including lululemon, KOMPAS VC, Happiness Capital, Extantia, and Leitmotif.
Until now, Epoch has been operating at pilot scale. The fresh funding will support the transition to a much larger demonstration facility, designed to validate production at commercial scale.
This site will serve as a critical bridge between lab innovation and industrial deployment, showing that recycled nylon can be produced consistently, efficiently, and in volumes brands actually need.
The company is also nears completion of its second and largest biorecycling plant to date. The ambition is not incremental growth but full-scale adoption across industries.
What motivated the foundation of the company?
Epoch Biodesign was founded in 2019 in London by Jacob Nathan and Douglas Kell. To TFN, the company revealed, “Jacob Nathan founded Epoch Biodesign in 2019 at the age of 18, during his final year of high school, after conducting an independent study into microbes capable of breaking down plastic waste. He chose to build the company rather than attend university.”
Jacob grew up in London and as a teenager, he was active in campaigning on plastic pollution and climate change, but activism alone did not feel like enough.
In his final year of high school, Jacob set himself an independent research challenge: to find microbes capable of breaking down plastic waste. The more he investigated, the clearer the scale of the problem became. Plastic production was growing relentlessly, recycling infrastructure was failing to keep pace, and the materials industry had no credible solution to create circular recycling. He saw a gap that technology could fill.
What started as a school research project became the founding idea for Epoch Biodesign. Jacob founded the company at 18, choosing to build the business rather than take up his place at the University of Chicago. The decision was straightforward: the problem was urgent, the opportunity was real, and waiting was not an option.
His core conviction has remained consistent since. Decades of consumer campaigns and voluntary commitments have not reduced the volume of plastic and textile waste. What is needed is a profitable, industrial solution that makes circularity the economically rational choice, not a compromise. Epoch’s enzymatic recycling platform is built on exactly that premise: using programmable biology to make materials circularity work as a business, not just as an aspiration.
Breaking down nylon to its building blocks
At the heart of its approach is enzymatic recycling, a process that goes deeper than traditional mechanical methods. Instead of melting and degrading materials, the company breaks down nylon waste into its original chemical components: adipic acid and HMDA.
These monomers can then be reprocessed into virgin-quality nylon 6.6 without relying on fossil-based feedstocks. The result is a closed-loop system where old garments, discarded textiles, and industrial waste are transformed back into high-performance materials.
What makes this particularly compelling is flexibility. Epoch’s technology can handle complex waste streams that would otherwise end up in landfills or be incinerated, such as blended fabrics, coated fibres, multi-layer laminates, and even mixed automotive plastics. That widens the addressable problem significantly.
Behind the scenes, the company combines AI with synthetic biology to design enzymes tailored for efficient, large-scale breakdown. It is a scientific approach aimed not just at recycling, but at doing it faster, cleaner, and with lower emissions.
Beyond the science, Epoch is focused on making adoption straightforward. Its recycled nylon is designed as a “drop-in” solution, meaning brands and manufacturers can integrate it without reworking their supply chains or switching production partners.
What’s next for Epoch?
2026 marks the point at which Epoch Biodesign moves from proving the science to proving the scale. The company’s demonstration facility in London is on track to come online this year, bringing enzymatic nylon 6,6 recycling out of the lab and into continuous industrial production for the first time. The site will process over 150 tonnes of waste feedstock annually and serve as the operational foundation from which Epoch’s commercial rollout will be built.
That rollout has a clear target. Epoch has made a public commitment to bringing a full commercial-scale nylon 6,6 biorecycling plant online by 2028, with the capacity to process more than 20,000 tonnes of waste per year. At that volume, recycled nylon 6,6 becomes available to apparel, automotive, and industrial customers at scale.
Epoch sees the next time window in which partnerships with major producers and brands move from technical qualification to commercial supply agreements. The MoU announced with INVISTA in early 2026 is a direct expression of that ambition: combining Epoch’s AI-engineered enzyme technology with INVISTA’s polymerisation expertise and global manufacturing infrastructure.
Alongside production scale-up, the focus is on deepening Epoch’s position across its core end markets. With countless active partnerships already spanning performance apparel, automotive, luxury fashion, and technical textiles, the commercial pipeline is established. The task now is converting that pipeline into long-term offtake relationships that underpin the economics of the 2028 plant.
