CxO wanted for Photobioreactor hardware startup

As employee #2 and CxO, you'll spend most of your first year wearing many hats with your fingers in many pies. The traditional roles associated with CEO, CPO, etc will emerge later and depending on fit.

Key & first-year responsibilities include: making sure there is enough cash in the bank; networking and lead generation to get partnerships and customers; marketing and communications, setting vision and strategy, hiring and retaining excellent talent, connecting with the aquaculture, clean water generation, and other industries (e.g. bioplastics, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, surfactants, biofuels); running great pitches, outreach presentations, and board meetings; keeping the organization flexible and adaptable for potential pivots; tackling urgent matters in due time; exuding calm, trustworthy leadership.

You will ideally have hands-on experience in establishing, running, or exiting a high-tech hardware startup.

• Building teams
• Talent Acquisition
• Communication
• Supply Chain
• Sales
• Finance
• Raising Funds
• Marketing
• Hardware startup

You have strengths in...

• getting in touch with people
• networking and business relationships
• organizing and keeping stuff tidy
• pushing and getting things done

You already have...

• raised an investment round
• exited a startup

Financing prototype design & development for scalable manufacturing trials.
Establishing collaborations and partnerships in communities (rural, customer), government (municipalities, NRC), academia, and industry toward pilot trials, and generating feedback.
Navigating regulatory hurdles of human-consumption products, and awareness and participation in federal regulatory activity (e.g. Canada Feeds Regulations 2022)
Establishing laboratory R&D space
Developing strong relationships with partners and stakeholders
Finding experienced mentors/advisors with appropriate backgrounds
Keeping strategic planning and long-term vision centered on customers.
Managing investors' expectations & risk
Navigating market entry & timing challenges
Ensuring diversification among financial sources, supply chains, partnerships, and investors
Some work in all early aspects of the business.

As employee #2 you'd have first pick of equity options, and would assist in sourcing SAFE financing toward making salaries & payroll for yourself and others. The company aims to be set up for shares options soon.

Accessible water and microalgal biomass, afforded by advanced manufacturing, biosecured with advanced materials, scaled through decoupled design.

PROBLEM: Aquaculture feed and human nutrition industries are increasingly using microalgae biomass as a sustainable, carbon neutral food source. The carbon-neutral life cycle of microalgae products can only be realized with carbon-negative production in photobioreactors (PBRs), which achieve a narrow range of productivities ~ 0.5 - 10 g/L/day in all combinations of reactor design and cultivated species to-date. Such low productivities highlight the importance of lifetime reactor CAPEX and OPEX in facility economics. The high, up-front CAPEX of traditional PBR materials is a highly acknowledged financial barrier to establishing new production facilities, while economic production in existing facilities is inhibited by dominating OPEX of labor to harvest/process biomass, electricity to circulate/aerate the microalgal culture, and downtime due to contamination and crashes followed by extremely time-consuming, multiple weeks-long staged restart of the culture. A PBR of radically different design may be able to mitigate these costs while achieving similar productivities and enhanced scalability.

SOLUTION: Through 17 years of microfluidic hardware development and a photobioreactor design PhD, the founder of Neuston has conceptualized a radically different photobioreactor based on eco-friendly, literature-proven TLR 3 materials that can be produced in scale, which will greatly reduce CAPEX and OPEX while achieving competitive productivities and solve key issues of traditional reactor designs, such as water loss, contamination risk management, outdoor environmental fluctuations, and resource-limited deployability.

Challenges

In chronological order: Fundraising, CxO hire, mentorship & advisor sourcing, patent applications, establishing laboratory space, prototyping core tech (creating a flexible, universal testing platform and a variety of test designs), and creating an atmospheric water harvester initial MVP.

Target group

The first target is clean water generation by developing an atmospheric water harvester MVP for individuals/homes, and later, using that developed tech, a photobioreactor MVP enabling a transition to biosecure microalgae feed for aquaculture operations, which commonly suffer from economic, supply, or sustainability deficiencies resulting from their use of fish feed + fish oils.