August
Validation from ALIS
August 7th
Ramón Alejandro de Hoyos Cantú is the Chairman of the Board, Founder and CEO of Biotechnology y Biorefinery de Mexico SAPI de CV. Better known as ALIS Algae Innovation Solutions, an environmental biotechnology company focused on water reuse, pollutant capture and generation of molecules of commercial interest using microalgae.
The meeting with Ramón was important because of his experience in the area, where he already sells a somewhat similar product. During the meeting we learned that, for companies, water treatment is considered a "process improvement", since the main focus is usually water reuse. With this we defined that in treatment procedures, it is essential to apply a pretreatment to the water before incorporating microalgae cleaning. In addition, there is the possibility of employing a symbiosis between microorganisms and microalgae, which could achieve scalable water cleaning.
Validation from EcoClean
August 9th
Francisco Bonilla Sevilla works in a company that provides water treatment services. In this meeting, we mainly learned about the market where we should target our product. We were told that, in Mexico, there are still no regulations for EE2 in industrial effluents, so it would be more convenient to focus on countries where such regulations are already in place.
In addition, Francisco indicated that our natural market would be the United States and Europe, as they have stricter regulations on these issues. They also suggested that we investigate water discharge regulations and the reuse of treated water in these countries.
At the same time, he introduced us to the idea of licensing the technology, allowing it to be sold to companies capable of producing the microalgae on an industrial and international level.
Meeting with Adrián Gálvez
August 26th
Adrián Gálvez is an investigator of the Water Center at Tecnológico de Monterrey, where he conducted research with EE2, the estrogen we are working with.
Adrian was an essential part of the entrepreneurship project since, from his experience, he helped us with part of the EE2 patent research and gave us hints of how to commercialize it when finished the project. Moreover, we were able to learn about some recommendations of who to approach and how to sell the final product.