Empowering Female Leadership & Environmental Sustainability: The Success Story of Fych Technologies
So I'm very excited by today's session with our guest Andrea Cabanas co-founder and CEO of Fych Technologies Andrea and her co-founder Oksana founded Fych within the University of Alicante after several years of research as PhD students in the field of waste management and plastic recycling. Thanks to their research. They have managed to get three patents for three Technologies focusing on increasing recyclability of plastics and also the quality of the recycled plastic material so Fych has been on the mission to convert waste into resources since 2019. Since then they have managed to grow the team to five employees. They have been awarded several
prizes and they have grown revenues to over a million Euro this year. So I think that's a very impressive start for such a young company especially without significant investor backing so very excited again and thank you Andrea for joining us and please walk us through your journey how did you become an entrepreneur. Thank you Katarina for the introduction and good afternoon. Maybe I can share the screen to show better to explain it better so as you said we started with the company ........ started in the research Field in 2016. But then we founded the company a few years later in 2020 in the beginning the co-founder and the founding team, we were the only ones that we were working in the company me, Oksana and Andres - he was our tested director in that moment so we in reality we met each other during our studies as chemical Engineers like many years ago in 2009 and then Oksana and I decided to make a PhD after we finished the degrees we started working in the industry but then we came back to the university to start discovering a PhD based on converting waste into new resources and we focused on Plastics and the different challenges that the industry is facing so this was Oksana started in 2016 and I started the PHD one year later and in 2019 we patented the different Technologies and then we realized we were really solving a real problem that the industry was having and in that moment we started to get interest from a big company from multinational companies and in that moment we decided to found the company so even before we finish the PhD we already founded the company and then one year later in 2021 we started hiring people for the technical development of the company so that Oksana and I will have more time to find a funding and also to find customers Our Technologies as you have said we have developed different Technologies to increase the recyclability of plastics and also to increase the quality.
One of them is the DL Tech that we call that is for the recycling of multi-layer packaging. If someone do not understand what is a multi-layer packaging do we think about any type of packaging that is used in the food industry like for packing pasta or for packing a bakery and also for milk and juices. It's using different type of materials so you don't have a single material in a packaging and the complexity of the materials that contains a package makes the packaging not recyclable with the conventional technologies that are available in the market. And this is why we started with the delamination technology to be able to recycle all types of plastic waste. On the other hand another problem that the recycling industry is facing is the bad smell or the contaminants that contain the plastic. Because normally when
we recycle for example a detergent bottle or a shampoo bottle this bottle afterward is used for making rubbish bins or for making Garden for gardening applications that do not require a high quality of the plastic but with our technologies that are able to contaminate and deodorize the plastic we can reuse again this plastic to produce another bottle of shampoo or detergent because we eliminate all the contaminants and about others in the in that are absorbed in the plastic. We basically have been developing the Technologies at laboratories scale for different type of materials and just to show you an example of the complexity of these materials so we are talking about snacks they contain different type of plastics and also they contain inks for giving the color and the marketing part and also aluminum because the aluminum is a very good material to keep the properties of the food. So we have a let's say a time for eating the chips much longer even up to a year if we pack it in this packaging then if we pack in a regular bag and this is really good to avoid the waste the food waste but on the other hand we have the problem of plastic waste but this is what we are solving with our technology because we are able to to separate the different materials. For example in this kind of packaging we have cardboard
that in this moment is already recovered in the industry but then we also have plastic and aluminum and with our technology we are capable to separate the plastic and aluminum and recycle them in different streams. Just not support you I will also explain the this is the pilot line that we have available for making all the tests and then the other Technologies to remove the orders with this technology in which we only use a stimulus esteem basically like when you iron the clothes and you use a steam and then you can fill the order of the softener for example we use the same technique but to extract the orders of the plastic and in this case what we achieve is a efficiency of more than 95 in the removal of others with this technology and a similar technology is used to the contaminate not only the odorous compounds but also the contamination in general that we can find in a plastic sample so this is the summary of the three Technologies and how we started from PhDs and we went to to entrepreneurs and it's quite challenging because nobody teaches you how to make a business from scratch and nobody is telling you how to find funding so this is something that we really learned. The technical part is the easy part for us to develop it at industrial scale for us this is doable let's say is easy. But finding money and also let's say being a good commercials. This is something more challenging for us. That's precisely what I wanted to ask Andrea you said that you were a researcher and then you sort of you saw that there is a lot of demand and you decided to create this company but I know as we've chatted before that you actually didn't have much business uh skills before or exposure to other startups so presumably it must have been a little bit scary wasn't it well I I guess it's it's a big leap so how did you really what was your thinking at the time.
At the beginning the first thing we thought is we have nothing to lose so let's try and see what happens but no it's just not just a straightforward like let's see what happens what we did it was first to go to different type of courses for entrepreneurship for PhDs where specific courses to go from PhD to make a business so that courses helped us a lot to develop the idea and to commercialize our ideas and our prototypes let's say of Technologies but of course there is a part for me the hardest part is the negotiation when you had to negotiate to sell something or to sell part of the company for for increasing your funding this is something that you know do never left because you don't have examples previously previous example so there is a moment that is the first moment and yes this is a most challenging powerful at least for me. And so today how much of your time is dedicated to really science and research and how much of it is really running the company. I would say only 20 is for Science and the rest is for running the company yeah because we are lucky where we are lucky we have a very good team a technical team and they are quite autonomous so we just make meetings and give some assessments but they know how to run a scientific part. So I assume that your life has changed quite a bit when you decided to become an entrepreneur. The way that you spend time in your day is very much different and presumably the lifestyle of an entrepreneur is also a little bit more hectic than the one of of a scientist so is there something that you that surprised you or that you miss now or are you happy. Sometimes I miss the science because let's say when I was doing the technical part I was in
my comfort zone but now it's more uncomfortable but in the same at the same time it's more I like it because I learn a lot every day and something that I like a lot is to travel so this is a good way of traveling by working and selling the products so I like the lifestyle but it's true that every day you'll never feel 100 comfortable because you do new things almost every single day. And so that was going to be also my next question what was your biggest learning to date. As I said I think the biggest learning has been the biggest challenge that is how to negotiate with big companies because learning what should be your starting point and learning how are they thinking to somehow to to I don't know to get is like playing to guess what is the other part thinking so I think that's the biggest learning universe as well but let's say you you learn and to think how others are thinking from their point of view so this has been addictive learning and I think in our school you learn that you learn that by by living and by experience do you also have any mentors or people who help you and guide you in the area of managing a team yes at the beginning that we didn't get when we didn't get any funding at the very beginning we knew a man that he had many businesses but now he is retired so he helped us a let's say for free that's a for fun for him in the development of the business and also in the patent applications and all the claims and everything and then now we hired we contracted ...... freelance that he is working to help startups in the development phase and in the baseball in the business development finding funding Etc so we have an external person helping us in that sense yeah otherwise is it's almost possible we needed some help and some people experience people that can tell us some examples of what is normal what is not normal in the negotiations Etc. That's really interesting. So tell us or maybe a little bit more about your customers and how many of them do you have and what is your plan for the future uh and maybe even what would success look like for you so we have a company in which we don't need let's say 100 of customers to be profitable we just need few customers that that really have the same mindset let's say that in which we have. So for
example in total we have has 14 customers since we started but like active customers that we work with them every month I would say like five six customers is what we have continuously and with that we are ready economically sufficient but of course we always want more and the most important is to not only not only to have customers because we one part of the company is for dedicated to the R&D and the other part is dedicating to the scale up of the Technologies so um we always start with R&D and then we move to a scale Up. So now what we need to focus is on the development of the technologies that started this year as R&D for the next year to be a scale up technology um and what would be helpful for you in order to grow more or faster if that is what you want. Yes this is what we are looking for now and what we need now until now what we have done is to license the technology to some customers for a specific type of waste and for a specific type of solution. But in this moment we have seen that we have many type of waste that we can recycle but uh only having a pilot prototype line that we have now it's quite challenging to sell the the technology so what we have seen now is that we need to become the experts on the running an industrial line and for that is for what we are now looking for investment to build our industrial line for recycling multi-layer flexible Packaging and this will make us grow because in Spain we can build the Recyclers of this type of packaging but then we can license the technology outside the spring and replicate the business making a new inventor or just by licensing.
So in the future you see Fych being all over Europe or potentially even outside. Yes, because already in this moment we have customers from France from Italy from Indonesia and from other countries Asian countries so yeah I think uh yeah the European and the Asian market now it's the most interesting for us so yeah I can see ourselves being outside Spain for sure. Is there a lot of tweaking that you need to do in your product in order to um enter a new market within with the different legislation. With a different not really you mean if we go to Asia for example. Yes in terms of their recycling processes how different are they. No because I think in the end uh the let's say the law in Europe is the most restrictive one for recycling um for for example for a water waste treatment that our processes and consume water so we need to treat the water so in the moment that you have everything ready for Spain or for Europe let's say it's easy to go to outside Europe because the regular and the legislation normally is not more strict than the one that we have now. I don't think that's not a problem but the truth is that
in Europe we have many legislation now that are pushing the recyclability of plastic packaging and this is helping us a lot to gain customers that really want to be involved in that transition. Yes indeed that's what we also see a lot of uh Tailwinds coming from the European legislation and the push to that zero and recycling more and more um one of my final questions would be around if you have any advice that you would give to today's students who are contemplating the idea of starting their own business. I would tell them if they have really any idea that they would love to bring to the market just start doing that but to start doing that please I would recommend go to look for specific courses to be entrepreneurial and to test your business model and to test your product or the process that you are developing to see if there is a real interest in the industry and if there is like this is what happened to us then go for it because in the end for me like you have nothing to lose you always can apply for other applications in companies and external companies but maybe it's the only chance or or is the best chance that you have when you really want to commercialize something that you have your own ideas and it's quite exciting I think it's that for me it's a very good experience.
Uh that's a great answer I did not even expect it but my second question that I wanted to ask you is whether there is any recommendation you would give to our University so working with students in in different uh fields in including deep tech and scientific fields in terms of entrepreneurial education which seems that had had been lacking in your case. Yes this we have been in many talks in the University of Alicante where they asked this question and the first thing uh we always say is that uh we should join different profiles like economics law and Technical profiles in in our common let's say maybe optional subjects in the different degrees that is entrepreneurship or how to build your own company and then I think it would be successful because then you meet people from different areas and together you can create ideas and you can create a company because this is something that we are missing yet and that we were missing from the beginning that we were all scientifically possible but not no one was coming from the economical path or from the law which is really really important when you start the company and I think a good idea for a university would be to make a program or or starting from some courses inside of the degree where you can join people with different profiles to work together in a common idea that they need to develop and I have seen Masters that include these options and in the end they become entrepreneurs because they have all the profiles that they need and then you motivate each other and that's I think that will be a successful thing to do. Uh one one of the big themes of the Inspiring The Minds project um is green skills and the other is diversity and inclusion um and you being a female founder and CEO together with your other co-founder Oksana uh you're the two out of three co-founders are are females I wonder if you see any any differences uh being women in in business compared to to men at all my experience until now has been good I would say but I would need to be a man to compare how the society behaves with one and the other I would say except for one or two comments that we have heard everything has been has been equal or has been positive I think sometimes when tampons want to invest in your company they ask what are your family .... if you are looking to have kids, if you are looking to be a mother etc. I think this is something nobody asked me. They will become fathers as well. But that is yeah I think it's
because of the age we start we started creating the company when we were 30s and we had no kids so everybody's expecting when this will happen and they will I don't know they think that we will run away or something but that's not the case maybe this is the only weak point that I have observed but really in just one it just happened once so I want to think that what they didn't have a bad intention when they asked about that but but yeah maybe in that sense they are a bit scared when for investing in companies made of funded by women that could be that could be a reason. Could be possibly uh perfect so how much would you say of your success so far has been would you attribute to luck and how much was hard work. .. laughing ... luck nothing is luck even sometimes that you could think that you are lucky and then you are lucky but when you realize why some company called you one day and you thought oh I was lucky that I got this contact and we'll start working together but in reality this is because you started a marketing strategy on LinkedIn or something and this is because then they look to your background and they saw same few publications they also they trust you and yeah and if you made a paper because you made a PhD you made a business because you studied so I feel lucky lucky maybe 10% lucky 90% of work great okay so I think that's a good advice also for everyone else listening uh hard work space and then you will get some luck on the way yes probably when you open yourself up for chances. Yes yes perfect thank you very much I think that was my last question anything to add from your side. No thank you very much for for the interview and for leaving us to tell our story and I hope
we could incorporate someone that is thinking about making a new business with new ideas great
2023-07-25 04:27
