BNEF Pioneers: Buses, Bioleaching and Better Batteries

0:00brought to you by Apple Card. Apply for Apple Card and earn daily cash back on back-to-school purchases, including 3% back on everything at Apple. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch, termsinmoreatapplecard.com. Hi, I'm David Weston. Join me every week for the Wall Street Week podcast to hear stories of capitalism from around the world, from geopolitical tensions and central bank decisions to artificial intelligence, energy, and infrastructure. We sit down with the CEO's economist, policy makers and thought leaders, whose decisions are shaping markets everywhere we find them. Subscribe to the Wall Street Week podcast on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. From a few of the winners, can you explain

1:01what Binaf Pion is? Sure, and thank you for having me. So the Bloomberg and F Pion is really our way to recognize cool energy transition innovation and celebrate it. We have been doing it for 16 years now, and it's an annual exercise we do, an annual competition in which we invite cool, innovative, impactful ventures from around the world to apply. We normally have three challenges for each year, three kind of unsolved energy transition challenges that we'll focus on and we'll invite innovators to apply. And then we always have also the Wall Card category, and then we'll get a few hundreds application every year, we'll announce, finally, the beginning of every year towards February, and then the winners later in April. Let's talk about the Wall Card category. The reason I say is in the last few years, when we've done Pion is podcasts, we've focused on individual challenges, but this year we're looking at the Wall Card entries.

2:02So why do we have a Wall Card category? And what are you looking for from the entrance? It's great to have a challenge and to have innovators applying around a particular problem, the industry, and kind of compare them, but it's also great to have a category in which we are really open-minded and we look into all sorts of innovations that could be impact for anywhere around the world, anywhere across the energy transition sectors. And it's amazing. We always surprise with some original impact for Ventures Outer that we can learn from and celebrate as winners. So looking to then the year ahead for Pion is, there's no shortage of areas in climate tech that need innovations. So what challenges have you set for the year ahead? So I'm going to leave everyone with a bit of suspense because we haven't decided yet. We are all going to meet to decide about the finalists, but please stay tuned. We are going to announce them in the coming weeks

3:03and I've seen the short list and they're all super interesting and exciting. So I can't reveal yet, but it will come up in the coming days. So as we're deciding on what the challenges will need to be for next year, I still suggest if you think you could make a good BNF pioneer, head to about.beneff.com slash BNF Pion is. And as soon as we have announced the challenges, we will be taking applications and we'll be looking forward to seeing your application. You can also visit the same website to learn more about today's guests, the other Pion is winners and challenges from previous years. Now to today's show, first we speak with Jit Bata-Charia, CEO and co-founder of Bazigo, an electric bus and charging infrastructure operator based in Kenya and Rwanda. After Jit, we speak with Liz Denet, founder and CEO of EnderLith, a biotech startup using engineered microbes and machine learning to extract critical minerals from low grade ore and mining waste. And finally, we speak with Frank Harley, Chief Strategy Officer at GRST, a Hong Kong-based clean tech firm

4:03that designed sustainable materials and manufacturing methods for lithium-ion batteries. So without further ado, let's get into today's show and find out more about Bazigo with Jit. Jit, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. You're the founder of Bazigo. Can you give us a little bit of background as to how the company came about? Absolutely. So it's actually an interesting story. The original idea for the company really started in April of 2020. So I was living in Nairobi at the time. I just moved there a few months earlier. And you remember, beginning of 2020, we were all living through the pandemic. And so I just moved to Nairobi and there was this magical three days where the government in order to get a handle on the pandemic, they actually stopped all the buses running. And if you ever come to Nairobi in many African cities, you know it's dominated by buses. There's these diesel buses, typically very old, that are just driving everywhere. So to see this overnight, the streets just empty and the buses disappear, that was amazing. But then something else amazing happened,

5:03which was we were able to see Mount Kenya 350 kilometers away behind the Nairobi skylight. And that was the first time in 30 years that you can do that. We were basically given this glimpse of what would happen if you could clean up the bus sector in the city of Nairobi. And that was my co-founder and I, my co-founder was actually in quarantine at a hotel, even Nairobi at the time. That's when we really began discussing this and saying, you know what, this is something that absolutely needs to happen. And that's kind of what spawned the idea. And we said, let's see if we can make the math work, let's see if the concept has legs here in this market. And can I ask you something? So what actually brought you to Nairobi? Because I don't know if there is a list, no, but you used to be kind of Silicon Valley, even working in Apple on the secret car project. And yeah, what brings you to Nairobi? And maybe something about the culture shop from the kind of high tech batteries for a potential luxury car to the reality of Nairobi public transport. You know, it's interesting. I actually first worked in Africa back in 2003.

6:06And that was actually what transitioned my career as an engineer from originally robotics over to climate change and energy and energy transition. And I always knew that I wanted to come back. And so I moved to Nairobi from Uganda. I had moved to Uganda a few years earlier to work in energy access. And you have this problem in Africa and in so many developing countries where fundamentally still so much of the world lacks access to modern energy systems, whether it's in their homes, whether it's in the form of transport that they're using. And so what had prompted the move to Nairobi was we were moving from Uganda. And we were seeing the very beginnings of this emobility transition. And that's what's interesting. You talk about this comparison to Silicon Valley. And absolutely, right? Like the emobility industry in the West, it's been very focused on companies like Tesla or projects like what we were doing at Apple, companies like Rivian. It's very focused on passenger cars. And these are what grab headlines and take so much attention. But it's interesting for me because I've been working in the emobility industry for almost 20 years. And the story that sometimes gets lost

7:08is that where emobility has really been working very well has actually been an emerging market. It's been markets like China going back even to the late 90s, markets like India, Latin America, Southeast Asia. And now I think the new emerging emobility story is really in Africa. It just looks very different from what we're used to in the West to where we're focused on pipe passenger cars. Here it's maybe more on two wheels, it's commercial vehicles, it's buses, it's trucks, but it's incredible to see the way in which it gets traction and starts to scale. So yeah, there's definitely some culture shock, but at the same time really an eye opening moment for me as an emobility engineer and entrepreneur. There seems to be a momentum behind electrified transport. And what is driving that? No, it's a really good question. There is huge momentum. There's huge tailwinds behind this transition from combustion engines and fossil fuels over the emobility and what's driving it is economic security to be totally honest, it's economic security. So countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, or Rwanda, we are importing 100% of our transport fuel

8:08from overseas. And we're importing it in dollars. In fact, in most African countries, import a fuel is the largest use of foreign currency reserves in the country. And this is a huge threat to economic security. So I'll give you the example here in Kenya. And Kenya, obviously we're going through a fuel crisis now, prompted by the war in Iran. But this is our second fuel crisis in four years. This is not the first time this has happened in recent history. And every single time it has a massive impact on the economy, it's massive impact on cost of living, unemployment, et cetera. And so when you see Ethiopia make moves like that, when you see countries like Rwanda really putting incentives in place to accelerate the adoption of emobility, the primary focus is economic security. Now there's the other benefits. There's the benefits around air pollution. There's the benefits around climate emissions, all of this. But what is driving this fundamentally is economic security. So I mean, that kind of leads on to a question around what Barsi goes model is. Is it a strong government-led mandate related to economic security that is created an opportunity for your company in Kenya and Rwanda?

9:12Or is it a sort of business driven model? And then exactly how does your business model work? It's a business driven model. And this was the thing also for me as an emobility engineer coming from Silicon Valley. That was another element of the eye opening moment for me in 2020. When we first started to look into this market and say, well, can electric buses compete? We know buses are an enormous market here. They are the primary mode of transport. 70% of the people in a city of Nairobi are using a bus every single day. And so the question is, do the economics work? Because in Africa, one of the things we've always said from the very beginning is, here in Africa, we are living with the reality of climate change. Climate change is not some future possibility. It is here already. It's affecting life every single day. However, in Africa, we're not able to make choices where we're paying a green premium for something, just because it's better for climate or better for the environment. It has to make economic sense first. The other issue we're dealing with is that most of the governments here are quite in debt. And so you're not going to get the same level of subsidy

10:13that we might see in markets like China and the United States. So if you're going to go through this energy transition, it really does need to compete. But that's what was amazing. What was amazing was when we started to look at how the technology cost for modern electric buses coming out of China had come down over the past decade and then applying it into the application context that we have here in Kenya, what we found is that electric buses could compete head-to-head against incumbent diesel buses without a single government subsidy. And that blew my mind, because I came from the US, where we literally could not talk about EVs without saying the word subsidy in the same sentence. And here we had a market that was Africa very cost sensitive. And yet the EV could compete head-to-head against the combustion incumbent without a single government subsidy. Now that was great. And when we were looking at that competitiveness, we were looking at it over the life of the electric bus. But you still have this fundamental problem in Africa. And that problem is the high upfront cost of the EV bus compared with the diesel bus. So of course, the upfront cost of the EV bus is going to be more expensive.

11:14And the problem in Africa is that we have a really high cost of capital, so the interest rates for car loans and things like that, they're much higher than what we would see, more than double what you would see in a market like the US. And on top of that, people here are really cash sensitive. So if you have to make a bigger down payment for something like an electric bus compared to a diesel bus, that's going to be a problem. And I should probably mention there's another really important feature of the African bus market. Our bus market is private sector. It is not government-driven. Other than in very specific places, it's almost entirely private sector. And so you really need to compete on economics alone. So the core element of our model, the key innovation for Masigo, where what's called an EV is a service model. Rather than bringing in electric buses and selling them, we basically bring them in and then lease them to bus operators. And we combine that lease with all the associated services needed to put that bus into operation. So for example, the charging infrastructure, the service and maintenance, the insurance. So we make it as easy as possible for these private operators to add an electric bus to their fleet. And in doing so, to finally realize those economic benefits, because the electric bus

12:14is more competitive than the diesel bus over its life. So that's the core element of the model and how we really got started. I'm curious to know given how robust the profits offer for operators taking this model. I mean, has there been any instances where the operator that you've leased a bus to hasn't been able to keep up with the payments? The answer is no. So far, we have basically no defaults. And the reason for that is, once again, their margins on the electric bus are much higher. So these operators fight tooth and nail right now to make sure that the electric buses stay within their portfolio. They do not want to default on their electric buses. But because you remember, the vast majority of their fleet is still diesel. I'll just give you the example here in the last few months, the price of diesel in East Africa has gone up as much as 40%. It's been enormous. And so they're really struggling to make ends meet on their diesel buses by comparison. The electric buses are where they're making their margins. So no, we're in a really great position right now where we have a good partnership with our clients.

13:16They want to make sure these electric buses continue to operate as much as possible compared to their diesel buses. And I think you actually managed to validate Zez's carbon credit, right? Recently. Yes. So that's an important element. I think of how the energy transition market here works is carbon finance. And the carbon market has gone through major ups and downs in the last few years. But we still think it's an important element of how we're financing the energy transition in Africa. So we were able to certify a gold standard project. So first, gold standard certified electric bus project here in Africa. So we're really proud to take that step. I mean, one question. I want to go back to the model for a second. So I could see how the pay as you drive model is super for the operators. And clearly, you know, you're stating demand is not an issue at the moment. But what about the flip side for you in order to kind of get all the capital to be dedicated to the buses, the infrastructure, and so on ahead of time? Is that the challenge for you guys to secure a bundled cheap capital for an emerging market

14:18country? It's both the challenge as well as the opportunity. I think for us, when we were first evaluating this model, it's what made my co-founder and I so excited. Because while we could provide this enormous economic benefit to the bus operator, right? Much lower financial risk, lower upfront costs, and faster time to break even. On the flip side of it, these are lease models that could earn as much as a 50% IRR. And 50% asset back IRR over the life of the asset. And when we look at infrastructure project or other asset back projects here in the African market, that's incredibly competitive. That is commercially competitive. So we saw this model that could have enormous climate impact while at the same time being commercially competitive and something we could eventually take to commercial capital in order to scale. So that's the opportunity. Now, of course, just like you said, this is also the challenge. Because in Africa, as much as we are very commercially competitive, and I'll give you the example, at a fleet size of just 50 buses here in Rwanda, where I'm sitting right now, our business model is already profitable. So it's really exciting.

15:20However, Africa, capital flows are always the challenge. And we are talking about if we want to replace thousands of buses in the coming years, which is the level of demand that we have, it needs hundreds of millions of dollars of capital to flow in. And this has been the main challenge for us. Our main constraint to scale actually hasn't been, people think it's charging or manufacturing. It's actually been capital flow. So you're absolutely right. Like that's the main problem to solve. Now, we're making some really great headway, both from international investors, as well as partnering with local financial institutions to help make that happen. But this has been the key puzzle. The key puzzle has been around the capital structure and how you unlock the capital needed for this transition. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. It's a new school year, which means yet another back to school shopping list. Luckily, when you use your Apple Card, you can earn 3% daily cash back on everything at Apple, including the new iPad Air and the MacBook Pro. Apply for Apple Card today and unlock the tools for a productive school year. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City

16:20branch, termsinmoredapplecard.com. The big tick podcast from Bloomberg News keeps you on top of the biggest stories of the day. My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day. Stories that move markets. Chair Powell opened the door to this first interest rate cut. Impact politics. Change businesses. This is a really stunning development for the AI world and how you think about your bottom line. Listen to the big tick from Bloomberg News every weekday afternoon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I said earlier, moving away from the finance, because I said, you know, in effect, you're kind of like a leasing company. And you said, yes, that's exactly what we are. But there's surely more to it than that, because we're to electric buses. And there's a need for supporting infrastructure. Is that a market you play in, or is there other buses using another party that's providing the charging? Yeah, it's one of the interesting things about being an energy

17:22entrepreneur here in Africa as compared to Silicon Valley. I remember my time in Silicon Valley where you get to really focus and you can work on one part of the problem because there's a whole value chain around you that's doing everything else. But in Africa, with energy businesses, that's usually not the case. You have to build the entire value chain yourself when you're the first to do something. And that's absolutely what we've had to do as Bossego. It's not just about the financing. It's also about bringing in the buses here in Kenya to make the buses compete. We have to locally assemble them because of the tax policies. So we're getting into bus assembly. We then have to deploy the charging infrastructure to be able to support it. We have to make sure that we're building in the AfterSales service network. So we have to build an entirely vertically integrated business just to serve our leasing company business model. And that's been tough. And that's one of the things that definitely makes this harder to get started. But when you get started, you have a great competitive advantage in doing so. Charging, I think, is the greatest example. We had to build out the charging infrastructure directly along these bus operating routes in order to serve the market and make sure

18:22that these buses could operate with the same level of convenience and uptime and everything. But what's great is in this private sector market, once we've deployed that DC fast charging network for our buses, during the day while the buses are operating, we can actually open up that one network. And so we're seeing this now in both Rwanda and Kenya, where as the EV market grows, we're having lots of other vehicles coming and using our DC fast charge network. We have the largest DC fast charge network in all of East Africa. And so now it's become an enabler for the broader EV ecosystem in addition to being in another revenue stream for busing. And how about the supply of the actual equipment and the other part of the value chain? Say you solve the capital and you solve the charging infrastructure. Is the West in line to be able to scale to the 1000 buses objective? With the current supply chains from Asia, definitely. I think we are absolutely in a position where we will be able to scale to meet the demand. I think the broader conversation here in a market like Africa, we're very late to EV compared to say,

19:24China, India, Latin America. We're really the last part of the world that's coming into EV. And an important discussion here is, how do we make sure that Africa can also be a strong, electric vehicle manufacturing hub? How can we actually start to produce the technology rather than just being a consumer of the technology? And so we're just getting started on that journey. It's starting with things like assembly of electric vehicles, but we're assembling technology that's still coming from China, from India and from overseas. But slowly, just like we saw happen in India, we want to start to internalize the manufacturer of some of that technology for job creation, to start to bring some of the IP over here. And so that's a big question. How do we go through and affect that transition? So we know that the global market is ready to supply everything we need to meet the demand, but we want to go beyond that and actually become an EV manufacturing hub. Can this model be scaled to other segments, other countries, other region? Yes, it absolutely can. And I think what we're seeing right now, globally when we look at commercial vehicles

20:25and the transition to electric, is that EV as a service models are becoming more and more common. So we're definitely trying to lead the charge here in Africa. What we've started in Kenya and Rwanda, we absolutely want to take to new vehicle classes and to new markets across Africa. And you're seeing similar things. Great examples are companies like Zanobi out of the UK, Green Cell Mobility out of India, Highland Park, and Forum Mobility in the United States. So we firmly believe that EV as a service model in terms of commercial vehicle electrification, EV as a service models are globally applicable and they're going to become more and more common as the sector grows. This is such an exciting space. And I know we didn't even get to ask you all the questions we had. I mean, we don't have time to talk about it, but I know you've got an electric vans business that's going to launch. I'll just mention that there's plenty more coming from Basi go. So I mean, of course, we choose our new energy pioneers because they're companies that are doing great things and are exciting and inspiring. And this is absolutely no exception.

21:26So, Jett, thank you so much for sharing your story with us today. Well, thank you guys so much for having me. I think having worked in clean tech now for 20 years consistently, I think the stories coming out of emerging markets haven't necessarily had the traction or the exposure that we've seen from clean tech in the West. And so it's really exciting to have this opportunity to share what's happening in markets like Africa. Next, we speak with Liz Denner, Founder and CEO of EnderLith, a biotech startup using engineered microbes and machine learning to extract critical minerals from low grade ore and mining waste. Liz, welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you, Tom and Benji for making the time. So, a kind of a softball opening question, I guess. Can you give us the background on EnderLith, like where did your company come from? And what's your story that led you here? So, make sure this. A small town in Alaska many, many, many years ago,

22:27it grew up in significant formative years in the middle of nowhere. And Alaska is one of those places where you have to hold this dichotomy of appreciating the nature we spend most of our time camping and fishing, but also most people worked as oil and gas geologists or mining engineers. So, right away you have those scales of how you protect and preserve nature, knowing that if it can't be grown, it has to be mined. That is really the origin story of me as a human. Lewis started, wouldn't it be enough? The kernel of the idea started probably five years ago. This is the Alaska to five years ago. I got a PhD in astrobiology. I worked for NASA, looking at how my probial life evolved on earlier. It worked for an early years company. I worked for Amazon, leading solution architecture for energy data platforms. Then it was over in Edinburgh is a VP of data architecture and data engineering. We had a really great research team that did a very deep dive on copper. We are sitting in one of my favorite pubs. It was the hanging bath in Edinburgh. Discussing what's going to cause the zombie apocalypse? There's a preface for what are the big paradigm shifting events coming up in our lifetime.

23:27It all makes sense if you have been past six pm at a pub in Edinburgh. This is very unbranded. I kept saying it's going to be freshwater. We are quickly running out of freshwater. Do you know how much chips you're going to take? Data centers you're going to take. One of the experts was actually like, no, Liz, it's going to be copper and being very glib. I was like, well, let's just recycle pennies. But I was also trying to put my head around this issue of copper and thinking, why don't we just take these low grade or things at the end of their life and use the cloud to optimize microbes to pour microbes in? Bing, Bing, boom, Bob's your uncle. We got a lot more copper without having to do much. How hard can it be? Turns out very hard. And then one of the guys I was chatting with put his beer down and said, I don't know is why aren't you doing that? Why are you sitting here drinking with us? Which I think was the first of many, many, many sleepless nights. I mean, there are so many questions I could ask. I mean, the origin of life on Earth being one. We have a brainstorm about realistic scenarios for the zombie apocalypse. Oh, I get all of my pub conversations led to me starting a business.

24:31And it's interesting you've gone from the big question to hone into something very specific, which is copper. And we maybe we're getting to a moment about specifically what your players in with copper but can you just for the listeners who aren't familiar with copper just really frame why copper matters. So right now wherever you are listening to this, a guarantee copper is involved. It is in your headphones. It is in the grid. It is powering your device. If you drive an electric car, those take significantly more copper than traditional automotive's. Winterbines take a lot of copper and are a favorite use case these days, data centers. Copper is the best non-precious metal to conduct electricity. And our entire grid is built upon copper. In fact, humans really started using it in the Bronze Age many, many, many thousands of years ago. And so what we're left with now is really low quality, low grade ores. And we need more copper between now in 2050 than in the history of human civilization. And that number and that demand is only getting higher as things like generative AI create more need for data centers. So it's the zombie apocalypse or it's maybe like some some Mad Max scenario where

25:35society has collapsed. And in Mad Max, it's always like there's something there's a shortage of they're all fighting over, which is in their scenario, it's fuel. In your vision of the future that everyone's fighting over copper. And there in that Mad Max scenario is this a little island of civilization where copper is abundant because Endolith is this island that is abundant with copper. So what is it that you're doing to be that sort of beacon of hope in this post-apocalyptic scenario? I'm not saying that this is your business plan by now. No, but this is actually very, very, because if you look at developing nations, copper is a stage gate for things like electricity and for a stable grid. And it really is the rising tide that lifts all ships. And so copper in and of itself may be like, oh, that's, that's pretty, that's cool. But eat is the foundational element, pun intended, that creates the grid stability. So you have things like stable electricity and operating rooms. And it really is the one thing that underpins everything else. So in a way, me saying, oh, copper is the thing in the zombie apocalypse. Is in a way naive it, because I'm from the west where we've been taking copper for granted?

26:38Exactly. Exactly. And I think as much as I try not to bring up modern apocalypse is whenever I'm talking to people, I think there's something very active about that. Because when we are thinking about elements of the climate, elements of what we need to do to have a safe and secure future for ourselves and future generations, it's so easy to be myopic and be like, but I have a stable grid. And then the Grapano-Laska, but I also lived in Houston. Both of those places typically lose power for significant portions when weather events come in. It really challenges some of those assumptions you have about safety and comfort. I wanted to ask, where do the microbes come in? Because that's really exciting. Can you take us through what's the normal process of extracting copper? And we are very curious about the microbes and how it works. Though the way that copper is extracted now is two ways. Either smelting with high-grade deposits or heap leaching. Keep leaching is the thing that we double-click on and focus on. It is used for lower-grade orers. It has fewer emissions.

27:39Essentially, what happens is mining companies take these low-grade rocks. Typically around 0.25 to 0.3%. They crush them, create these giant stacks, color than any sports ballerina, and they spray sulfuric acid on them. That gets maybe 20 to 60% of the copper out. What we do is we grow microbial communities on site. We grow them in sulfuric acid and they get hooked up to those sulfuric acid irrigation systems. They get to take the journey of a lifetime. And doing that, they are able to do things like create more heat within the piles, catalyze reactions, and ultimately create significantly more copper recovery. And the more copper we get out of these heaps, the less that turns into waste or potential tailings, dams are acid-mine drainage. That's so fascinating. I would have never, you know, you don't associate microbes. With extraction of metals and, you know, sulfuric acid. I want to try and understand a little bit more about the sort of the big picture on this, because high-grade or as if I understand correctly, use smelting, lower-grade or use the heat bleaching.

28:41Are we operating in a world where a lot of the high-grade ore is less and less accessible and we're switching to more low-grade ore? That is spot on. The high-grade ore has been mined for a very long time. And the challenge is demand has only been increasing, but we haven't fixed supply. All of the materials we can call this planet were set very early in the Earth's life. Millions and billions and billions of years ago. And our ancestors were very clever. They were able to get to the high-grade materials. So what we have left are waste deposits on the surface. We have mines that have been running for 20 or 30 years, and increasingly have lower and lower quality materials. Or we have to find new mines. In general, it takes 10 to 16 years from finding a mine to getting first copper. And that is a huge lag given that demands were doubling the amount of copper we need by 20, 30 minutes. We don't have that kind of time. And the geology just doesn't support it. I remember down New York summit, you said, basically, the venture would not be able to exist 10, 15 years ago. You know, is a progress in DNA sequencing and cloud computing.

29:43Can you take us through what change and what enabled your innovation? Biomining is not a net new concept. There have been previous approaches. There have been academics that have written a lot of papers on it. What is fundamentally new is the way that we can bring data into the cloud and look at the data. The third of our team are software engineer to data engineers. And by instrumenting all of our equipment and all of our experiments, we can look at how these microbes grow, how they change, which ones are active. We've optimized dozens of different microbial communities. That technology to have both the turnaround time for DNA sequencing, the price and the ability just to store it in the cloud did not exist probably even five years ago. Our head of platform, Shannon Whitmore, she recently joined us from alumina, largest DNA sequencing company. Like we were so excited to get an alumina DNA sequencer in house. Then having her be able to take that raw data, to shorten the turnaround time and integrate it into some of these really nifty and cool emerging algorithms. I think most startups these days are using AI in some form or another.

30:44For us, it's really about getting the right data in and the right data architecture. I don't know, 15 years ago in grad school, I was excited to have 100 DNA sequences. And now every time you run this sequencer, we get more than five million DNA reads. It's just, it's unprecedented. So, where are you on your journey, kind of, from testing to scaling it? Can you find some of these solutions on the ground? You can. We are officially in the field. We have been for not too long. We have our first field deployment is in Arizona. We are doing a lot for domestic copper production. We as a company were based in Denver. So it's not too far down the road. But for us, we've been really targeted on looking at minds that have been running, your what are called brown field minds, and how we can either get more out of materials that right now the technology has them as waste. They're not economic to recover. Or we can take their existing higher quality materials and get significantly more recovery out of those. And are your customers really buying the microbes or the software

31:45or microbes as a service or what's a business model? It's pretty close to microbes as a service. We have been engaged with a number of mining customers up and down the value chain. And really for an early stage startup, it's about providing safe solutions. At the end of the day, if we can get more copper out and show that that works, an increasingly difficult and real world environments, it's going to be the key that unlocks everything else. I'm just curious. I mean, it seems like it's always exciting and inspiring talking to our new energy pioneers because, you know, like I said, there's an opportunity both in terms of the demand and how you can meet that demand with new technology. What's the biggest challenge you face? Candidly, I never thought I would be a startup CEO. It was never a role that I had in mind for me. I am a science PhD with purple hair. And then it's not a paradigm that you see copypasted throughout the industry. I always plan on being a CTO, the nerdy technical one that gets to write out Redox reactions on the board. So for me, making the time and space to invest

32:46in my own leadership journey, letting aspects of my personality that are very core, I'm very enthusiastic. I'm very nerdy. I never want to cover those things up, but I also have to build and surround myself with people that are differently skilled in so many areas and just take their advice. So honestly, the funding is always going to be challenging. Customer adoption always goes, those are things that you expect coming into it. For me, being part of the 2% of solo female founders that get VC funding has probably been the biggest challenge. That's a very candid answer. And I mean, all the more reason why we're rooting for you to be the change. The big tick podcast from Bloomberg News keeps you on top of the biggest stories of the day. My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day. Stories that move markets. Chair Powell opened the door to this first interest rate cut. Impact politics, change businesses. This is a really stunning development for the AI world and how you think about your bottom line. Listen to the big tick from Bloomberg News every weekday afternoon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

33:50or wherever you get your podcasts. So, so Liz, we met in New York and it was actually amazing to hear about your journey and everything. And I wanted to ask you, how was it in terms of the experience of winning pioneers? And if you have any other advice for founders out there trying to make the world better? Winning pioneers was absolutely absolutely surreal. We have many friends within the space that have been pioneers who I look to for mentors. My first BNEF summit was the week that we started fundraising for our seed round many years ago. And I remember hearing about the program with such, just such awe, my friend Megan, who's the CEO of Encycle, she was a pioneer and she was the one that ultimately encouraged me to apply. And really it's so competitive and such a big deal that it was, it seems a little bit of imposter syndrome, but also it was really incredible to meet the rest of the pioneers being these events, talking about real conversations and the things that we obsess about. The advice I would give to others who are interested in this

34:51is the application really helps you think through and target your business case. It is much more similar to any VC cycle than to just a general award application. And the more that you are able to really articulate your end customer who you are, what your vision is, that's only going to make you stronger as a founder. So I would absolutely encourage anyone to apply. The network and the opportunities are really fantastic. We're also a world economic forum, pioneer, and both those events, all the Bloomberg events I've into and all the world economic forum events have the same type of, hey, let's have real conversations. Let's talk about what's working, what's not working, and what's importantly, how can I help you? And that is really something to double click on. Thank you so much, Liz and congratulations again. Thank you so much, Benji. Thank you so much, Tom. This was a great conversation. I really appreciate it. And finally today we hear from Frank Harley, Chief Strategy Officer at GRST, the Hong Kong-based clean tech firm that designed sustainable materials and manufacturing methods for lithium-ion batteries.

35:56Frank, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, great to be here. So you're from GRST, which is one of our new and cheap pioneers winners. In 2026. So can you give us a little bit of background to GRST and how the company came about? GRST was founded in 2015 by two entrepreneurs in Hong Kong. One was a scientist from the battery space and the other was using a lot of batteries in their products. And they said, we need to design this upfront to be circular and also non-toxic. Everyone at that time was focused on improving the performance of batteries, but there's also a need to make it more sustainable. I mean, I'm pulling your leg here a little bit, but with a name like green renewable sustainable, it's only fitting that you're looking to take a technology that is already considered green and thinking of ways that it needs to be greener. Yes, correct. So one issue in the batteries that we chose to tackle is on the binder. Now, binder is the high-tech glue, which holds all the active materials on the electrodes.

36:59The challenge with the binder is that number one, it uses forever chemicals. So there's a toxicity concern as we scale up battery production and end-of-life issues with how do we handle these forever chemicals in the battery. And second, the binder makes the battery difficult to recycle. Although it holds the active materials very strongly on the electrode when it comes to recycling, there's a challenge. How do we release these active materials and make them usable in a new battery? So instead of having to use intensive thermal energy, heat to melt it or use solvents to release, we design the binder to be soluble in water. This makes it very, very easy to recycle. So your binder solves two problems, actually, which is the fact that it's not forever chemicals, and so it doesn't have that long-term toxicity. And when it comes to the end of the battery's life, I'm thinking of this as a non-expert. It's not all so glued together in a way that can't be undone because you can use water to break down the solvent. Anyway, you can dissolve the binder in water and the different parts you want to recycle are

38:02therefore easier to pull apart. Am I getting it? Exactly. In layperson's term, you basically, once you've opened up the battery, you can give the electrodes a water bath, and then everything slowly separates, and then you have that black mass, they call it, which includes the lithium and the other active materials, which you can then use to reprocess and put into a new battery. So you can get it very easily, and it makes it a lot less expensive and less energy intensive to do that first stage of recycling. And does the binder that is greener also costs the same, or is it a premium that the manufacturer will have to pay to do it in a greener way? We match the price and the performance of the existing binder. That is the key to being able to integrate with all the major manufacturers. They don't want to pay a green premium and they like to match or at least have a slight improvement in performance. So we designed our binder to achieve this. So I mean, there's one thing being kind of being competitive and having parity, but I imagine that the technology that you've developed

39:04and its environmental benefits really come into their own when there is some sort of legislation supporting these, the greener value that it offers because we know even in the the green tech space, people aren't adopt greener technologies unless there's something in it for them. So are we seeing government regulations that might also support either the forever chemicals benefits or lack of forever chemicals benefit that your binder offers or the recyclable benefits? Yeah, definitely. In Europe has been leading the way on this, the European chemical agency, over the past several years has been pushing hard to remove forever chemicals across multiple industries, textile electronics automotive. And in the battery space, although they will probably give quite a long phase out period, it's definitely put it on the radar of most of the major users of batteries in the EU. And so they are looking for solutions now. So this has opened the doors to us.

40:05And what happens is we get a European customer, maybe a big EV company has now told their battery supply chain in China. I want you to put this into your R&D plan and make sure in the near future we'll be able to have batteries which are free of forever chemical in the binder. And that's where we are at now. We are now integrating with the major boundary manufacturers in Asia and a few in Europe as well. So one thing that I'm just sort of trying to get my head around is the the sort of the scale of the problem of forever chemicals in lithium-ion batteries because honestly, I actually didn't realize that this was an issue with lithium-ion batteries. Is it entirely just the binder or are there other elements of the battery that also contain toxic chemicals? So the scale of it, I mean on the binder side, for every gigawatt hour of production, there's around 50 tons of forever chemical-related binders used. So you can imagine, last year we produced around 2,000 gigawatt hours but the plan is to get to net zero, it's probably around 300,000

41:08gigawatt hours. This is going to entail 15 million tons by 2050 of this forever chemical which, as its name says, once it leaks into the environment, is around forever. So this is quite a large risk and as you noted, it's one of the lesser known risks but now is the time to make sure we have the clean alternatives in there so that we don't face this problem in the future of cleaning up forever chemicals that either are coming from the supply chain during production of the battery through leakages or at the end of life through improper handling of the recycling. So I suppose what next and if we're looking at GRST in 10 years' time, what do you think we'll be saying? Well, our mission is to become the global standard for batteries which are free of forever chemicals and water recyclable for circularity. Now, I think we are the most advanced in terms of commercialization for this binder and we expect, you know, in terms of how fast it can be adopted, we look actually at the at the anode side, there were changes to the chemistry of the binder

42:09about six, seven years ago and it only took a couple years for it really to spread once you've got a couple of the major manufacturers have switched to it. So this can become the dominant binder system globally in the next six, seven years. Can I ask you something a bit different from where you see an all your experience in the space? Are you optimistic about the kind of battery industry in terms of both meeting the demand and also doing it in a sustainable way? And are there any other changes you think need to happen aside of the kind of binding side of thing? I'm very optimistic. Battery performance has really improved and just continues to improve and I think the sustainability is now something that all the developers can afford to look at seriously. The consumer awareness is rising and you know, people are able to visually see how small changes can have a big impact on making batteries more circular and less toxic. I'll give you an example. For us, we're working in a

43:11on a project now in Bangladesh where there are six million electric rickshaws using lead acid batteries. These have toxicity issues not being recycled properly. So lead poisoning, they have great performance, but they need to be improved. And so we are now converting the battery fleets there to our clean recyclable lithium ion batteries, which can be recycled very simple facilities three to four years down the road in a country like Bangladesh. So people there can have more economic value from their battery systems. I suppose it's just a broader question. Other other aspects of the battery where you can kind of foresee that there's this potential by tweaking or replacing one sort of element of the technology you can make a huge jump. And are you looking at any other such opportunities? Well, for us, we're really focused on the binder. There's so much to be done there. Integration, while we are a drop-in on our side, it takes quite a bit of work to match the formulations that the OEMs need. So that's what we're focused on now. And that will take our efforts for the next five

44:16years. I think there's a lot of other innovations happening, making recycling easier, and we're working with groups, especially for the popular chemistry now called LFP, which is a lower cost, but hard to recycle profitably. So we are teaming up with groups that can take our black mass generated using our binder, which makes it easier to get the black mass to then take it to the next step and make it into a new battery material using processes that make even LFP profitable. And what's the biggest challenge you face at the moment? Because it seems like there's great momentum with GRST in your technology. It seems, you know, it makes sense, but it's never that simple. So what is the thing that you guys and you as the Chief Strategy Officer are looking at that, you know, challenge hurdles you need to overcome to achieve division? Well, the challenge was initially to get the large battery manufacturers to test our new binder. We achieved that over the past five years by getting pressure from the end customers,

45:17such as European EVs, consumer electronics companies to open the door. And now the challenge for us is it's really a frontline engineer challenge. And so luckily we had our own factory where we could test everything and be really confident how it would work in a commercial scale factory. And now the challenge is just tweaking the formulations, working through all the cycling and getting it optimized for each manufacturer's process. And one challenge of battery is that it takes the product cycle as long. So, you know, that you have to charge discharge, charge, discharge to test the cycling life. There's physical limits to how fast it can be done. So it takes one, two, even up to three years to properly integrate into a facility. So we're halfway to two-thirds through that process now. Got it. Frank, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks. Today's episode of Switched On was produced by Cam Gray with production assistance from Kamala

46:19Shetling. Bloomberg NEF is a service provided by Bloomberg Finance LP and its affiliates. This recording does not constitute nor should it be construed as investment advice, investment recommendations, or a recommendation as to an investment or other strategy. Bloomberg NEF should not be considered as information sufficient upon which to base an investment decision. Neither Bloomberg Finance LP nor any of its affiliates makes any representation or warranty as to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained in this recording, and any liability as a result of this recording is expressly declined. The Big Take podcast from Bloomberg News keeps you on top of the biggest stories of the day. By fellow Americans this is Liberation Day. Stories that move markets. Chair Powell opened the door to this first interest rate cut. Impact politics, change businesses. This is a really stunning development for the AI world and how you think about your bottom line. Listen to the Big Take from

47:24Bloomberg News every weekday afternoon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.