How do you work with something that is one atom thick?
Meet the DTU team making graphene affordable and accessible for climate tech.
Hello friends,
The science venture 2D, founded by Abhay Shivayogimath from the Danish university of DTU, developed a way to make graphene easier to work with. They’ve demonstrated how 2D’s graphene can unlock affordable carbon capture and improve the lifetime of batteries, solar and fuel cells. The business brains behind 2D, Morten Hald, joined the team via Earthbound’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence program to apply his entrepreneurial expertise, and has helped bring the venture to its first commercial sales. In this interview, Abhay and Morten talk about 2D and the collaboration between science and entrepreneurship. It is as breathtaking as it is fun!
Best wishes,
Team DTU Earthbound
INTERVIEW WITH SCIENCE VENTURE 2D
We sat down with founder Abhay Shivayogimath and Business Lead Morten Hald, who joined via Earthbound’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence Program, to talk about the great potential of 2D, the hardships and what comes next.
What problem are you solving?
Abhay Shivayogimath (AS): We’re addressing the challenge of working with a material that has enormous potential in a vast range of applications, but has not been commercialized due to the fundamental difficulties in producing and applying it at scale. Graphene is a proven wonder material, one carbon atom thick, with enormous potential. It’s the strongest material known to man. One thousand times more conductive than copper. It’s resistant to most chemicals, high temperatures, and radiation. It’s arguably the most promising nanomaterial out there, poised to become a trailblazer in the clean industry revolution.
Morten Hald (MH): But before you can even think about unleashing graphene, you need to make it accessible in a form factor that allows industry and academia to include graphene in fast-tracked, advanced development cycles and subsequent manufacturing. And how do you even work with something that is one atom thick and nearly invisible? Abhay’s method makes it a lot easier. You get graphene on user-friendly plastic foil and you can take normal scissors and cut your graphene and simply stamp it on your application surface. That is almost a revolution from how it’s been done previously, where the graphene had to be transferred from a metal catalyst using chemicals in the process.
Working with a material that has so many potential applications, how do you decide what path to take with it?
AS: Narrowing pathways is a combination of what our technology excels at – and the market angle of looking for where current materials are not cutting it, rather than trying to outmuscle a status quo that works fairly well. We’re trying to find a completely undiscovered paradigm for using this material. There have been quite a few applications which I’ve gone through, and through these iterations I’ve realized we need to focus on key applications which are not so advanced that incumbent technologies have had the scale and to really entrench themselves – which means high barriers to entry – but not so early stage that it’s essentially a science experiment without a market.
Graphene has been around for a long time. Most Fortune 500 companies have done some R&D into graphene, but most of that research has been abandoned. Instead of focusing on graphene's unique applications, industry looked to graphene to solve an existing problem better than what already existed – mostly in electronics. The competitor, silicon, has had a 40 year head start and trillions of dollars of R&D to optimize itself and its many use cases. You’re fighting a Goliath. Now we’re really trying to focus on the applications, where graphene’s unique features are simply not available in other materials and where graphene can really make a difference. Fortunately, the work in finding and vetting such applications is showing great promise, not least since key stakeholders across industry and academia are embracing the potential of graphene, especially when it’s now more straightforward to work with and comes with a real promise of mass-application.
MH: It’s both a curse and a blessing to work with something that has so many unique features that it’s probably got something to offer in most applications, I mean graphene can be applied in medtech as a bio-sensor, in a shoe sole, it can reinforce spacecraft and provide vital plumbing in the fusion energy reactors of the future... you name it! But as Abhay said, you need to balance options with business sense. We have a good start with clean tech applications like carbon capture. That’s why we’re working with Earthbound; there is such a need to get these technologies out sooner rather than later.
What’s the potential climate impact of your innovation?
AS: Graphene is an enabling material for next generation applications addressing resource efficiency and climate change mitigation. Current climate technologies risk depleting the Earth of its resources if we continue to scale them. With solar, with wind, with batteries… if they are going to replace global fossil fuel use in any appreciable amount, they will in their own right consume massive amounts of raw materials and yet another net-negative impact on our planet. More sustainable materials are mostly in the R&D phase with challenges that need to be solved.
With regards to carbon capture and storage (CCS), graphene membranes can filter out CO2 more efficiently than competing technologies. They can drop the cost of CCS to the point where it’s not only financially viable, but potentially profitable. This would provide a strong market driver to decarbonize at scale, embracing both large emitters and millions of SME’s with hard to abate emissions.
How did you come up with this idea?
AS: I’ve been fascinated with materials since a young age. Almost all technological advancements can be attributed to a major advance in the availability of new materials. The materials are the foundational basis for disruptive technological progress. I think we’ve reached a point where many technologies are maxed out on the materials that we have available, so now more than ever, we need new materials to enable that step change in new technologies to come.
During my studies I quickly zoomed in on graphene. For its properties, but also because it was inherently painful to work with in the lab. Yes, you could make it on a metal which is industrially available at low cost and produce it inside furnaces which are already used at industrial scale using processes which are available. The challenge was, how do we actually get this graphene off of the catalyst material onto where you can use it? I did a PhD on large scale production and transfer of this material, because graphene transfer is really the thing that stops it from taking off. I came up with a method in 2017 which was about getting graphene of copper using this water-soluble polymer. Initially it was failing a lot. But as I kept working, I kept improving it to a point where it was as good as, or even better, than other available transfer technologies.
When I started doing my Masters, we would struggle to transfer 1x1 cm size graphene samples. I remember in my first few months of PhD we tried to transfer 10x10 cm area of graphene and it took me over a month and I did not succeed. Last month, we produced nearly 100 meters of graphene. That’s the scale at which we have progressed. The technology has come a long way, and now is the right time to get graphene out there.
Where is 2D right now as a project?
AS: We are getting more concrete as a company and have basic operations in place. We’re in this stage now where we’re getting the first industry interest. We’re ready to hit the market and expand our manufacturing capacity. We’re ready to sell.
MH: Our initial market is selling sample-size graphene in user-friendly packs to R&D in academia and business. Once we get these small samples out, magic is bound to happen as our material is put in the hands of the best and brightest at technical universities or R&D departments in big and small corporations. A lot of ingenuity and smart thinking has gone into the material as is, but imagine when graphene all of a sudden becomes easy to work with, and you let that capability mushroom out into a lot of smart people.
AS: In this process of selling samples and getting early feedback from customers, where they work with the material and realize problems that nobody would have thought of, we can then iterate on that and co-develop and produce a better product. That’s what we want to focus on. Competitors can provide graphene in different form factors, but what’s the unique selling point for us is that you can actually interact and work with this material without a lab, which unleashes a lot of creativity.
What are the challenges of working on a deep tech solution like yours?
AS: There is a chicken and the egg problem in selling a product that doesn’t have a well-established market yet. We’re creating a market. At the same time, from a technological perspective, we’re in the pioneering stage because when scaling a new technology, you need to figure it out along the way. Transitioning from a university to a spinout has presented its own set of challenges.
MH: The silver lining is we don’t have to wait five years to present a full and final carbon capture membrane, for instance, in order to determine whether this is a success or not. There’s already success in the sense that the platform material that we’re now selling is working, and it’s really generating a stir in the advanced materials R&D community. I think that’s a good thing with this venture – we don’t have to wait years to issue the first invoice, demand for the core technology is already there.
What was it like to be matched and to work together on this project with your different backgrounds?
AS: It’s important to select the right candidates early on. Technology only goes so far – it’s the people who build the company, so it’s very important to have the right people. We took a rigorous process in selecting Morten, and we’ve had a good time working together. He’s been very supportive in navigating 2D especially in the turbulent times we’ve had in the last couple months.
MH: I think another aspect is how you blend in and how easy it is to hit the ground running. I’ve worked with small teams and startups, I’ve worked abroad and in multi-cultural environments. 2D is going to be a global company from the get-go, not just in the team composition but also in the markets that we’re going to operate in. So that’s been a benefit.
I’d been working in various industries, including clean tech, med-tech, and telecoms, very well-defined verticals with very well-defined technologies and ways of doing things. Starting to look at this material that was miniscule in dimension but with potential for huge impact in these massive industries that I have worked in previously is just mind boggling. It’s a combination of rational thinking but also all that you can dream about – the things you see in movies, you read about in futuristic novels, and then here you have something that actually works based on solid science and can be applied right here and now. To work with that and to explore building a business from it is just fantastic.