No trade-off

Almos Domonkos Kuti & Lidia Kuti
Founders Smobya

What started with a leather-like material for fashion and automotive soon revealed possibilities far beyond those original markets. For Smobya founders Lidia Kuti and Almos Domonkos Kuti, that discovery made their ambition bigger. But also, their challenges. Building a biotech company has taught them about patience, difficult decisions and knowing when to call on people who know more than you do.

Smobya is a biotech company developing high-performance materials through its NanoTwine™ fermentation tech nology. The process uses food waste as feedstock for micro organisms, which convert it into nano cellulose. This nanocellulose can be engineered during and after growth and processed for different applications, offering an alternative to animal-based and plastic materials.

As they developed their technology, Lidia and Almos began to realise just how widely it could potentially be used. “What I didn’t expect was how many industries have an underlying problem that our solution could potentially solve,” Lidia says. “The scope has become much bigger. That’s exciting, and if we do this well, the impact can be massive, much bigger than we initially thought. But it also means we must really understand these new industries, their customers and their business cases. Our technology has to grow with that.”

A different clock

While the potential of the technology became bigger, Lidia and Almos also discovered something else: building a biotech company follows a very different timeline from the startup stories they were familiar with. “When we started, the startup examples we knew were mostly software companies,” Lidia says. “You hear about companies scaling within a couple of years. Hardware and biotech are vastly different. Producing things takes time, and if you need unique equipment, you build it yourself. Building our demo plant taught us to plan with real production timelines, and we plan very differently now than we did at the start.”

The same is true on the customer side. Asking a manufacturer to switch materials means asking them to rebuild part of their supply chain. That is expensive and risky. “I care deeply about sustainability; it’s a big part of why we started Smobya,” Lidia says. “But we learned quickly that it’s not what moves an industrial buyer. What moves them is proof: the material performs better, it makes sense on cost, and every batch is the same as the last.” That is also where Smobya sees the challenge it wants to solve. “The performance of bacterial nanocellulose was never in doubt,” Lidia says. “Cost, control and consistency are what held it back for decades, and that’s why we’re building Smobya.” Growing along with the company has required Lidia and Almos to keep learning too. “Find the right people to help you who are smarter than you,” Lidia says. “We turn to experts, advisers and people from the industry who have scaled up before. We ask specific questions based on their knowledge, so we have enough data to make decisions. But intuition is also a big thing you need to rely on.”

Another part of that learning process has been getting to know how they each respond under pressure. “My first reaction can sometimes be emotional. Almos keeps his calm and stays strategic when circumstances are frustrating or outside our control.” Almos sees their persistence as another strength. “Bad decisions often come from not having enough data. We try to map out the options we have, and we’re persistent in that regard. Lidia is hard to say no to: she will find the answers. That’s a good combination for making good decisions.”

A ‘pinch me’ moment

With long development cycles and the constant stream of challenges that comes with building a company, it can be easy to overlook how far they have already come. One moment in particular made Lidia stop and take notice: interest from a large, respected company whose name she cannot yet disclose. “As a startup, you dream about working with companies like that. And then suddenly one of those companies is interested in what you are developing. It was a humbling feeling, but also confirmation that what we’re working on is needed if we want to change the way these materials are manufactured.” It was, she says, a genuine “pinch me” moment. “You realise: this could really become something, and we could achieve what we are here to do. Of course, you get dragged back into everyday tasks and problems very quickly. But it’s good to stop sometimes and reflect on what you’re trying to achieve.” Almos recognises that feeling. “We probably don’t appreciate those moments enough in the everyday rush. If you stop and think about it, it does feel pretty good.”

From Budapest to Limburg

Scaling the technology has been one of Smobya’s biggest challenges from the start. The company’s first pilot was built in Budapest, but moving from successful lab results towards larger-scale production required a next step. “We were working on our first pilot in Budapest,” Lidia says. “But the real bottleneck in biomanufacturing is not the biology but translating lab results into large-scale production.”

LIOF first met Smobya at Slush in Helsinki in 2024. What started as a conversation about a possible investment gradually became part of a much bigger decision for the company. “Along the way, it became clear that the Netherlands, and Limburg specifically, was the right place for us to grow.” Getting there wasn’t straightforward. Smobya needed a consortium of investors, while the company was still in a relatively small pilot phase and preparing for the move to Venlo. At the same time, a demo plant was needed to produce larger quantities of the material. LIOF took the lead in bringing together an investor group with Joanna Invests and Earthstar, helping Smobya make that next step. For Lidia, Limburg has more to offer than a location for that next production step. “I think Limburg has a real chance to become a hub for biobased performance materials. The region has decades of experience in high-performance materials, and that knowledge is still here. Now the whole biobased chain is here too: agrifood side streams from the Greenport region as feedstock, chemical and materials expertise at Chemelot, and strong university partners and talent within reach.” That combination is also reflected in the support around Smobya. LIOF, Brightlands Campus Greenport Venlo and Brightlands Chemelot Campus have worked together to help the company establish itself in Limburg and connect it to the expertise and infrastructure it needs.

But having those ingredients is not enough. The difficult step, she says, is helping companies move from pilot to industrial production. “Many biobased materials work in the lab, but far fewer make it to industrial production, because that step takes time, money and infrastructure most startups can’t build alone. What would make the difference is connecting these strengths around companies not only at the startup stage, but at the scale-up stage too, with more financing for the bridge from pilot to first production plant. That’s where most promising materials get stuck.” And if that bridge can be built? “Biobased materials won’t just start here, they’ll grow and flourish here.”

The company subsequently moved to Brightlands Campus Greenport Venlo, where it is building up its demo activities. For Lidia, the location also puts Smobya in a much stronger environment for the next phase. “The technology is ‘de-risked’. It is no longer a scientific experiment, but a scalable system. Here we are in a real biotech hub, in the NRW triangle, surrounded by leading European institutes in biotech, chemistry and materials. We really feel supported here.”

Beyond sustainability

For Lidia and Almos, the ambition goes beyond simply replacing one material with a more sustainable alternative. They see a broader problem in the continued use of plastics and chemicals, including the microplastics that end up in the environment. But they also know that sustainability alone will not convince industries to switch materials. “When we buy materials that are sustainable, we often find that they have their faults,” Almos says. “There can be compromises on performance. What excites me is eliminating that trade-off, not having to choose between sustainability and performance. If we can do that with the material and technology we have, we can bring much wider change to the materials industry.”

That is where Lidia sees particular potential in biotechnology. “Biotech as a tool has already been very successful in many industries. Using it for materials is very exciting. We already see how many different properties we can engineer into it, and there is always room to optimise. We have very promising data showing that we can beat commercial materials. That’s exciting to us: biotechnology can become a way of making materials that perform better than some of the materials we use today.” “And we’re being smarter about how we make them,” Almos adds. For Lidia, that is an essential part of what makes the technology sustainable. “It’s not only about the composition of the material, but also about how we produce it and how we feed our microbes. Instead of using petroleumbased inputs, can we use waste streams and turn them into high-performance materials that outperform materials made from petroleum? That’s a really cool thing to do. It’s nature’s superpower, in a way.” Almos takes that idea back to a basic principle. “Waste is inherently a man-made concept. It doesn’t exist in nature or biology. Bringing that principle into industry, and the idea of eliminating waste, is something we’re really excited about.”