When Nuha Siddiqui and Kritika Tyagi pitched their packaging foam while studying at university, they used a creative way to grab the investors’ attention – Siddiqui ate their product in front of the panel.
“We didn’t have decades of experience,” says Siddiqui. “But what we did have was the proof of our technology and willingness to build a solution that was truly transformative.
“So we thought we could prove that by eating the product to show how this could truly change the way we think about plastics and packaging, with something that’s so natural and so non-toxic that you could actually eat it.”
Tyagi remembers the judges “audibly gasping” as Siddiqui began to consume their packaging made from regenerative agricultural waste, and there was a moment’s silence before everybody started applauding. “I felt the energy shift and it was so inspiring,” she says.
Inspiring is a good way to describe the two 28-year-olds. As the planet drowns in traditional plastic waste, the company they co-founded, Erthos, is working to reimagine the building blocks of plastics with sustainable biomaterials, offering scalable alternatives for a range of everyday products. Erthos product applications include items such as personal care containers, hangers, pill bottles and keg caps for the drink and brewing company AB InBev.
Their journey began at the University of Toronto, where the friends first met in an entrepreneurship club. “Kritika and I come from very different backgrounds,” says Siddiqui. “But what brought us together was our shared passion for solving the plastic crisis using science and business, and finding a way to do it in a really meaningful and impactful way.”
As they were getting started, they juggled their studies with long evening sessions testing packaging materials. Siddiqui remembers that some of their peers at the public research university thought they had too much on their plates.
But this only spurred them on. “We eventually took the leap and decided that we weren’t going to take corporate jobs and we would give this our full-time attention,” says Tyagi.
A brave decision and the right one – nearly half of startups dissolve within five years, but six years later Erthos is thriving. Last year, it raised C$6.5m (£3.6m) of funding, increasing its total financing to US$11.2m (£8.3m). Then, in May, it announced a new direction, Erthos Studio, which saw it transition from a manufacturing company to an AI-powered climate technology company, with a goal of accelerating the widespread adoption of sustainable materials worldwide.
But that’s not all the pair have achieved. The duo, who started as Ecopackers packing peanuts during their time at university, slowly evolved their product. Packaging foam no longer the focus of their company, Siddiqui and Tyagi’s Erthos progressed to biomaterials manufacturing over time, as the partners knew the importance of not just replacing one application product, but the materials themselves.
This transition comes at a time when many companies are beginning to publicly acknowledge that they may not meet their sustainability targets by 2025. “We’re still seeing a massive amount of plastic pollution,” says Siddiqui. “And big brands are missing a lot of their targets when it comes to reducing plastic in our environment. So the pivot was our response to the urgency that exists today.”
While the news cycle frequently presents AI as a threat, Erthos Studio is well equipped to show how new technology could be a saviour, in the form of Zya, its proprietary machine learning AI platform.
“When we think about Zya, we think about how it can be leveraged to really push the boundaries of innovation and rethink the way that we do research in material science or any chemical based industry,” says Tyagi.
Zya has a database of hundreds of replacements for traditional plastic ingredients. The database also includes the company’s custom propriety ingredients that the in-house lab invented. All ingredients have been vetted to improve the performance of the biomaterials that clients use to apply to their sustainable products.
From day one, all their work has been grounded in a keen awareness that some people are being impacted by the climate and plastic crises more than others. “We know that there’s a disproportionate impact of this in marginalised communities,” says Siddiqui.
“So right from when we thought about building Erthos, we thought about it in a way that was scalable and genuinely made an impact in the communities that truly needed it.”
They’ve come far since their days at the University of Toronto, where Siddiqui studied environmental economics and commerce accounting, and Tyagi plant biology and English language and literature.
They beam as they acknowledge the role their alma mater continues to play in their journey. “The University of Toronto does a great job of putting you in an environment where you can meet extraordinary people who have very similar passions, beliefs and visions,” says Siddiqui. “It played a key part in our early days and it gave me the purpose that I have today.”
Recognised as one of the top five university business incubators in the world by UBI Global, the University of Toronto has “an incredible network”, says Tyagi, and its programming has “really provided us with so many different opportunities to speak” in “a multitude of different forums”.
She and Siddiqui were recently back at the campus and visited the basement where they first decided they were going to embark on the project.
“That was where Nuha decided she would reject her full-time job and I wouldn’t continue to pursue further education,” she says. “It was really sweet walking through those halls again – the university will forever be woven into the fabric of Erthos and the story that we’ve created.”
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