We considered possible future business cases and possible future commercialization.
Davy was very excited by the prospect of using our proteins in future space projects.
Davy Hsu is a business development manager at Trade Wind Bio, the synthetic biology company that has generously hosted our wet lab work. He visited our team to give a lecture on the business and financial side of biotechnology, followed by an interview where we asked how our specific project might be evaluated by investors and industry judges.
Davy began by walking us through how a biotechnology company sizes up its market: identifying what problem the technology solves, who would actually buy it, and how a business would reach those customers, whether through conferences, industry publications, or platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram. He then introduced technoeconomics, the practice of backing up a technology's value with real, STEM-grounded calculations rather than qualitative claims alone. Investors, he explained, need to see the math before they will trust a product. As a working example, he pointed to Avantium, a company developing PEF, a bio-based plastic alternative, to replace or compete with the existing PET supply chain, and suggested we build similar cost and funding charts for our own plan. He recommended the Good Food Institute as a resource for this kind of modeling, and suggested borrowing cost assumptions from established programs like NASA or SpaceX where our own numbers are still uncertain, while being careful to distinguish which assumptions are safe to borrow and which are not. He also introduced Porter's Five Forces as a framework for thinking through the different ways a business, ours included, might succeed or fail against competitors.
Davy discussed several companies working in a space similar to ours. Carbios uses an enzymatic approach very close to our own, breaking plastic down and then using polycondensation to remelt it into new plastic, while Origin instead converts waste biomass into PET. Both, he noted, are public companies, which means they must disclose their financial statements every month, unlike private companies, which face no such requirement; this asymmetry shapes how fairly companies can be compared to one another. He was candid that the space industry itself is difficult to forecast, since nearly all money invested there rests on long-term assumptions about a market that will not be proven right or wrong for a decade or more; SpaceX, for instance, is reportedly targeting an IPO in 2026 at a $1.5 trillion valuation, a number built almost entirely on future expectations rather than current revenue.
To explain how analysts approach that kind of uncertainty, Davy introduced the discounted cash flow (DCF) model, which estimates the present value of a company's shares from its historical data while discounting future money to account for the fact that it is worth less than money in hand today. He also described a "reverse DCF," which works backward from a market valuation, such as SpaceX's $1.5 trillion figure, to reveal the growth assumptions, launch cadence, and material throughput that the market must already be pricing in. He connected this to reporting on how SpaceX ties Elon Musk's compensation to Mars colonization milestones, drawing a parallel to how Tesla's compensation structure incentivized Musk in the EV market, and noted that a company's strategic value to a government or region, such as TSMC's importance to Taiwan, can exceed its value to outside investors, since TSMC represents not just a chip company but a substantial share of Taiwan's global economic leverage.
When we asked Davy what makes space systems so expensive to develop, he pointed to time itself: the build-test-learn cycle for space-qualified systems can take years, and that time is the single most expensive part of the process. He suggested we could offset this by leaning on the growing number of commercial space companies, such as SpaceLab and Blue Origin, that are democratizing access to space infrastructure beyond NASA and government programs.
Asked what he would emphasize if pitching our project to investors, he pointed to systems-level technoeconomics: an asset that can be repurposed to produce different outputs is worth significantly more in space than on Earth, since shipping costs in space are so much higher, and he encouraged us to focus on the flexibility of our enzyme scaffolding as a selling point. On the risks a judge or investor might raise, he was direct that readiness is everything; claiming a system is complete means little without technical evidence and experimental data, ideally including preliminary results collected under space-relevant conditions. He distinguished a "market critical" technology from a "nice to have" one by whether delaying its use on Earth creates real, immediate costs, arguing that our job is to show how our system mitigates risk and cost in space rather than simply existing as a future possibility.
On reducing the cost of our enzyme product, Davy suggested we look to Carbios's model, but reframed our relationship to that company: rather than positioning ourselves as a competitor, he saw an opportunity to partner with Carbios, since our scaffolding technology could enable their mission across many different enzyme targets, with PET as only our first. Finally, when we asked how he expects the space industry to evolve over the next 10 to 20 years, he was candid that most current space spending is tied to military and national security priorities rather than commercial applications, and that any forecast of how large our market niche might become is an assumption that will only be validated or disproven decades from now.