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There was a time when most cutting-edge industrial research was conducted at massive corporate R&D organizations like DuPont Central Research and Development and General Electric’s campus in Schenectady, New York. Such institutions went the way of the battleship and horse-drawn buggy. Big companies still do research, of course, but it tends to be honed more to meeting the immediate needs of their businesses than to making big breakthroughs.

Start-ups now take on many of the risks in innovation, and in C&EN’s latest 10 Start-Ups to Watch, which were revealed on Monday, we profile noteworthy new companies that may come up with the next big thing. The firms aim to make textile dyeing more sustainable, carbon capture more affordable, and cancer drugs more precise. Enjoy reading!

Questions? Comments? Tips? Let us know. Email Alex Tullo, C&EN’s senior correspondent for business, at a_tullo@acs.org.

Top stories from C&EN

• Despite a spate of recent deals, biotechnology financing is still slow as big pharma and venture capital firms continue to take a cautious approach to dealmaking.
• Arena BioWorks, cofounded in 2024 by Stuart Schreiber, also one of the founders of the interdisciplinary Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has shut down amid a poor financing and uncertain policy environment.
• Consumer products companies aren’t meeting the plastics sustainability commitments they made years ago, and plastics recyclers are suffering.

Business in brief

Ineos negotiates exit for China petrochemical venture

Ineos is in negotiations with its partner, the Chinese state-owned oil and chemical company Sinopec, to exit their petrochemical joint venture in Tianjin, China. Ineos bought into the partnership in 2023, when the complex was already under construction. According to Sinopec, it started up in 2024. The facility has a 1.2 million-metric-ton-per-year ethylene cracker and downstream polyethylene and other derivatives units. In a financial report, Ineos said that move was “due to continuing weak market conditions in China.” The joint venture, as well as another Ineos partnership with Sinopec, Shanghai Secco Petrochemical, lost money in the third quarter. When Ineos bought into Secco in 2022 it was supposed to be the start of a broader collaboration between the two firms.

—Alex Tullo

Oman explores green methanol hub

The government of Oman is working with a consortium of Spanish companies to develop a facility in the country to produce e-methanol—methanol made from renewable electricity and captured CO₂—and use it to fuel maritime vessels. Oman is located on the Arabian Sea near major shipping routes. Officials from Oman’s transportation ministry signed a set of agreements with Acciona & Nordex Green Hydrogen, the e-fuels developer HIF Global, and the regional investor Al Meera. The partners say the deals set up legal and business frameworks for the partners to select sites, share technology information, and start regulatory work to support a project in Oman’s Dhofar region.

—Craig Bettenhausen

Vianode to build graphite plant in Ontario

The battery anode materials maker Vianode has announced plans for a multibillion-dollar synthetic graphite plant in Ontario. The firm says the project will start with an initial investment of $1.425 billion and expand from there, aiming at a final capacity of 150,000 metric tons per year. That first phase will employ 300 people when it starts production as early as 2028, Vianode says, and the fully realized facility will have 1,000 jobs. The firm uses petroleum coke, a by-product of oil refining, as its raw material. The company opened its first commercial facility in Norway in 2024. Vianode says that in addition to electric vehicles it will target applications in semiconductors, nuclear reactors, and steel production.

—Craig Bettenhausen

Air Products looks to turn Louisiana blue hydrogen gray

The industrial gas firm Air Products and Chemicals is negotiating deals that would convert a planned low-carbon hydrogen project in Louisiana into a conventional hydrogen production site, CEO Eduardo Menezes told investors during the firm’s fourth-quarter earnings call. The original plan was to make hydrogen from natural gas while capturing the resulting CO₂ emissions for geological sequestration. Menezes said Air Products is divesting the CO₂ capture and sequestration part of that, including the connected underground pore space it was developing. To the extent the firm does find customers willing to pay a premium to sign long-term contracts for decarbonized hydrogen and ammonia, it will contract with the buyer to provide carbon capture as a service, he said. Menezes also left the door open to canceling the project entirely and separately selling off the sequestration pore space.

—Craig Bettenhausen

BASF starts up units at big China complex

BASF has started manufacture of the first products at its new Verbund integrated chemical complex in Zhanjiang, China. The company, which owns and controls the site, started construction in 2020; BASF’s board approved the main elements of the complex, including an ethylene steam cracker, in 2022. BASF says that at a total cost of $10 billion, the project’s construction is coming in under budget.

—Alex Tullo

Quote of the week

LanzaTech gets cash to turn greenhouse gases into ethanol

The biobased chemical maker LanzaTech says the European Union’s Innovation Fund has awarded it a €40 million ($46.2 million) grant to help it build a plant in Norway that will turn smelter furnace gases into ethanol. The US firm says the project will produce up to 23,500 metric tons of the alcohol per year from carbon monoxide–rich gas generated in Eramet’s manganese smelter in Porsgrunn, Norway. Carbon dioxide created in the process will be liquefied and stored in geological formations under the North Sea. LanzaTech operates six similar facilities in China and Belgium, but it has long struggled to become profitable. An investor in LanzaTech, Carbon Direct Capital Management, offered to buy it at a discount in April, saying the sale might be the only thing that keeps the company from going bankrupt.

—Michael McCoy

Element Solutions to acquire electronic materials maker EFC

In its second deal announcement in as many weeks, Element Solutions has agreed to buy EFC Gases & Advanced Materials for about $360 million. EFC is a supplier of high-purity specialty gases for semiconductor and other applications that, according to Element, has grown at a compound annual rate of more than 15% since 2009. In July 2024, EFC announced plans to build a $210 million semiconductor chemical facility in McGregor, Texas. The purchase announcement follows an Element agreement to buy Celanese’s Micromax unit, a maker of inks and pastes used in electronics, for about $500 million. Element said at the time that the purchase would increase its sales to the electronics industry to about $2 billion per year.

—Michael McCoy

Evotec to sell French biologics plant to Sandoz for $350 million

The generic drug maker Sandoz has agreed to purchase a manufacturing facility from the German drug discovery firm Evotec Biologics for $350 million. The site, in Toulouse, France, has in-built technology for continuous manufacturing of biologics. The two companies partnered for the first time in 2023; that move allowed Sandoz to access Evotec’s artificial intelligence–driven, continuous manufacturing technology to develop biologics. It was around that time that Sandoz separated from Novartis to become an independent company. Meanwhile, the new deal could yield more money for Evotec, with royalties of over $650 million on up to 10 biosimilar molecules developed by Sandoz.

—Aayushi Pratap

Novo Nordisk loses to Pfizer in bid for Metsera

A bidding war for the weight-loss drug developer Metsera erupted in late October when Novo Nordisk made an unsolicited offer for the company—despite it already having signed a merger agreement with Pfizer. In response, Pfizer raised its bid and filed a suit accusing Novo and certain Metsera shareholders of anticompetitive conduct. Novo returned with a higher proposal, but Metsera ultimately chose Pfizer’s further revised offer, valued at up to $10 billion, saying that it carried lower regulatory and antitrust risk. Novo says it will not be making an increased offer. Pfizer has since initiated a second legal action claiming that Novo had no real intent to buy the company.

—Elizabeth Walsh

Azalea Therapeutics launches with $82 million for gene therapy

Azalea Therapeutics has launched with $82 million in series A funding and technology that it says can make in vivo precision genome editing possible. The start-up evolved out of a collaboration between Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna and University of California, San Francisco, professor Justin Eyquem. The firm says it can deliver CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing machinery directly into human T cells using a T-cell-tropic adeno-associated virus vector, thus removing the need to manufacture edited T cells for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy in the lab.

—Max Barnhart

What we’re reading

• Fierce Biotech remembers all the biotechs lost in 2025 in its latest Biotech Graveyard: Fierce Biotech
• Doctors probe a link between chemicals and Parkinson’s disease: Wall Street Journal
• How The Line, the Saudi dream of a 100 km super city, is unraveling: Financial Times