Welcome to our first newsletter

This is the first edition of the ReSurfify newsletter, and we are glad you are here. Each month we will share an honest account of where the company stands: what we are building, who we are building it with, and the milestones that move us closer to producing sustainable biosurfactants at scale.

May was a defining month. We advanced our technology, deepened our commercial relationships across several industries, and laid the financial and engineering groundwork for our first demonstration facility. Here is what happened.

Technology

Our 20L demonstrations are underway

Jody and I have kicked off our 20L demonstration runs, and the early results are promising. These runs are already generating a wealth of process insight as we prepare for our 150L demonstration, scheduled for September. Just as importantly, they are producing significantly more material, which allows us to accelerate collaborations with industry partners and to carry out the regulatory and certification safety testing that the Kinjani grant will fund.

We anticipate completing the 20L demonstrations by July, keeping us firmly on track toward larger scale.

Market & Commercial

Building demand across multiple industries

We made significant commercial progress this month across a range of industries.

A partnership with Brenntag

Brenntag is the global market leader in chemical and ingredient distribution. With operations in more than 70 countries and a network connecting tens of thousands of suppliers to hundreds of thousands of customers, Brenntag is the channel through which a very large share of the world's specialty ingredients reach the market. In practical terms, they supply almost everyone.

Following a productive site visit to Brenntag South Africa's Johannesburg headquarters, we are establishing a partnership to co-develop personal care and homecare prototype formulations. Brenntag will present these to their customer base, helping us build a local market with the reach of a global distributor behind it.

We have also received positive feedback from Oh Lief, who has trialed our acidic sophorolipid variant. We are hopeful that this relationship will deepen into a formal offtake agreement ahead of the capital raise for our 10,000L demonstration facility.

Expanding into agriculture and beyond

We are accelerating our exploration of additional sectors, including agriculture, where we are now working with two South African agrochemical companies to develop solutions built around our biosurfactants.

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RegenZ, in collaboration with SoilScopes, is evaluating our biosurfactants as a replacement for the synthetic wetting agent in their liquid biostimulants.

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A fertilizer producer in the Eastern Cape is exploring our biosurfactants as a wetting agent in innovative fertilizers made from the residual streams of the region's many saw mills.

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A local biotech company is evaluating our biosurfactants as a novel food ingredient, drawn to their emulsifying and foaming properties.

Each of these partnerships represents an important step for ReSurfify as we continue expanding the sectors in which our biosurfactants can replace synthetic alternatives.

More importantly, as these collaborations mature they are expected to convert into the offtake agreements that underpin the investment case for our demonstration facility. Validated, paying demand across several industries is the foundation on which we intend to build.

Recognition & Funding

Selected for Kinjani's The Lab accelerator

ReSurfify has been selected for Kinjani's The Lab accelerator. The program included an intensive two-day founder's resilience course in Cape Town on 21 and 22 May, and has led to a R755,000 returnable grant.

We will use this funding to complete the safety evaluations needed to commercialize our products across our target industries, removing a key barrier on the path to market.

Scaling Up

Designing our 10,000L demonstration facility

We have completed the preliminary high-level design of our 10,000L demonstration facility and are now moving toward formal quoting with established South African equipment distributors and EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) firms. This work will sharpen the costing estimates that underpin our capital raise, which follows the completion of our pilot demonstration.

This facility is intended to be the first demonstration-scale biosurfactant plant on the African continent. Its purpose is fourfold.

Demonstrate the process at 10,000L. A milestone that unlocks development finance for our first commercial-scale facility.

Begin early commercial distribution with our industry partners.

Produce enough material to build the local market with Brenntag as our distribution partner.

Serve as a model for vegetable oil refineries. We can take a refinery's waste streams, run our process on their feedstock, and form joint ventures that integrate our technology directly into their facilities.

Thank you for following our journey from the very beginning. We will be back next month with our progress. If you would like to discuss any of the above in more detail, simply reply to this email.

Warm regards,
The ReSurfify Team

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ReSurfify

Pioneering the future of sustainable biosurfactants

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