6.6.24:MIT STEX Demo Day: Atacama Biomaterials

PALOMA GONZALEZ-ROJAS: And hi, everyone. I'm very excited to be here. My name is Paloma Gonzalez-Rojas. I did a master's and a PhD at MIT in machine learning and also a postdoc in chemical engineering funded by the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. I'm going to present you my company, Atacama Biomaterials.

So we named the company Atacama Biomaterials because of the Atacama Desert in this picture. We do renewable plastics that are zero carbon and zero waste because the Atacama Desert looks like this right now, covered with plastic waste, and this horrific reality repeats all over the world and inspired us on a life mission.

So Atacama has 20 companies in our pipeline, with seven ongoing pilots that are testing our products, alternatives to plastic. And this is our mission, to serve these companies and help them decarbonize their products.

So we develop sustainable plastic alternatives at low cost from diverse local raw materials because we use AI and robotics to create a zero-carbon footprint and zero waste.

Atacama built an AI robotics platform that delivers tailored material formulations in three months. It optimizes variable biomass to minimize cost and ensure performance and impact of our materials, and it also gives us leverage to overcome supply-chain problems by enabling us to use multisource raw materials.

So Atacama's AI enhances performance to ensure that our materials comply with our clients' needs. An example of this is our first AI experimentation that increased the tensile strength of our packaging products by 600%. That has been extended to other properties of the material. So Atacama replaces plastics, specifically packaging, with AI-scaled, low-heat composites from regional biomass.

Woodpack is our flagship product. It's a platform material. It's 100% bio-based suite of flexible films. It is paper recyclable and compostable, both certified at industry level. Woodpack is uniquely manufactured with low energy, unlike conventional plastics and even recycled plastics, and it is price competitive with these materials in order to be able to serve global corporations.

With the deployment of our products, we are aiming for a 2 gigaton of CO2 mitigation by 2035. This conveys the replacement of all polluting materials globally.

Woodpack has been validated through a pilot with Roche Pharmaceuticals in Latin America. We started by replacing traditional poly bags with Woodpack in their logistic operations. Then we scaled into packaging for the large medical devices. This success led us to apply our AI platform into tailoring a specific formulation of Woodpack for cold-chain logistics in just three months. This formulation is validated with their customers and is currently going through a certification process.

We have validated applications across markets for our packaging solutions, our flexible packaging solutions, in e-commerce, beauty, food packaging, health care, and industrial logistics. And we just had a breakthrough in coating Woodpack with aluminum plastic free, unlike paper that requires an adhesive made of plastic. And so if you're looking to test our materials, we would love to get pilots with all of the members of ILP.

This is us, Atacama Biomaterials cofounders, myself, Paloma Gonzalez-- I have two degrees in machine learning from MIT and a postdoc in chemical engineering where I did acceleration of molecular dynamics with reinforcement learning-- and Jose Tomás Dominguez, a mechanical engineer with extensive experience in entrepreneurship developing robotics in the Atacama Desert that clean solar panels, and now we're working together in Atacama. Together, we have won prestigious competitions at MIT, Harvard, and also at Dassault Systemes.

It is time for Atacama to blossom again, and with you, we can make a difference today. Thank you.

SPEAKER: Thanks so much, Paloma. So again, a reminder for everyone to post your questions to the startups in the Q&A chat, but I'll start. Why can you handle these complex plant-based polymers now?

PALOMA GONZALEZ-ROJAS: We can handle a-- we can handle the complexity of biomass because we use AI. Before, it was a challenge for mass manufacturing to handle variability, and these materials were unreliable, and this is a huge problem for mass production. And because we are using AI, we are able to develop reliable products and new products all the time.

SPEAKER: Thank you. And also, how are you planning to scale and to work with a corporate, as an example?

PALOMA GONZALEZ-ROJAS: We are planning to scale by retrofitting existing paper-making facilities, factories that are dormant and also cheap all over the world. Atacama has the mission to be scalable and to have global impact from its origin. This is why we crafted this path, that it's cost effective and also immediate and practical. And with the addition of AI, we can handle the complexity of delivering these solutions all over the world.