Young entrepreneurs developed a product that is easy to mix with any type of paint or coating and efficiently removes air-polluting gases. One square meter painted with this nanotechnology is equivalent to the decontamination performed by four mature trees.
“Join us on this journey and let’s clean up the whole world together” is the ambitious invitation from Matías Moya (28), a mining engineer and one of the creators of Photio, an additive for paints and coatings capable of mimicking plant photosynthesis.
Can you imagine a building that cleans the air? This is already possible. Surfaces painted or coated with Photio and exposed to solar radiation (natural or artificial) are able to break down polluting gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, transforming them into inert compounds (a photochemical process).
Photio has received several awards, including Know Hub Ignition 2020, the program supporting the creation and maturation of science- and technology-based startups that Know Hub Chile runs together with the University of California, Riverside (UC Riverside). This gave them access to mentoring and advice from national and international professionals to advance the maturation of their startup in legal terms, team building, intellectual property strategy (they are in the process of patenting) and, of course, defining their value proposition and, therefore, their customers.
How can you confirm that a technology like this does what it claims? That is where certifications are essential. Two prestigious national universities carried out the first certification, for efficiency and removal. They verified that Photio can transform 10 different types of greenhouse gases into harmless compounds (the competition only transforms a few gases). The results were better than expected: one square meter painted with Photio is equivalent to the decontamination performed by four mature trees.
This year, Photio is expected to add two new certifications from international institutions, validating that the technology also acts on volatile organic compounds, or VOCs (Ireland), and against viruses, bacteria and fungi (England). Next year, a certification in self-cleaning and energy (Italy) should be added.
From the (homemade) lab to the market, a winding road
Photio’s story begins in 2017, when Matías Moya and Jaime Rovegno (31) were studying at the metallurgy and innovation laboratory of the Universidad de Chile. That was when they heard “that mining operations had a huge pollution problem: high dust levels, large amounts of gases emitted by all the equipment inside the pit, which are those huge holes where the ore is extracted, and that there was no solution,” says Matías.
They had caught the bug. They began researching how to solve this problem, which involved a wide range of logistical complications, since it was difficult to install structures or plant trees in the areas where polluting gases come out of the mines. After long brainstorming sessions between the partners, and a strong desire to create social and environmental impact, they found the answer in plant photosynthesis and nanotechnology: they formulated the Photio nanoparticle complex.
“It wasn’t like we woke up one day and said: ‘This is Photio’s composition.’ We had to make do with little money, with not having a lab, with doing the tests as homemade as possible and seeing whether it worked or not,” says Matías, who is originally from San Fernando (O’Higgins Region).
The next step was to solve the dilemma of how to bring their product to market beyond mining companies. Should it be a paint? Matías explains that making this product involved a huge investment cost. They also faced a significant risk factor, because they concluded that people choose paints mainly for their color and not for other characteristics (such as whether they clean the air). Finally, paints have essentially been the same product for decades, so an innovation like Photio could take considerable time to gain a foothold.
“We realized Photio couldn’t be a paint and had to be an additive. That’s how we designed the sachet so anyone can turn their paint into an air-cleaning paint,” he explains.
Turning science into innovation
Knowing their product’s competitive advantages was another key aspect. For example, Photio does not alter the physical properties of the paints it is added to, and it is anticorrosive. This process of understanding their own product and knowing who to sell it to is a path they have traveled with Know Hub Chile since 2020. This technology was one of the winners of the 2nd generation of Know Hub Ignition, a program the corporation runs together with UC Riverside that seeks to support the creation, maturation and internationalization of science- and technology-based startups.
For Matías, the support of the Know Hub Chile team has been “very important.” “In a first stage, and we are still doing it, we developed the technology, certified it and validated it, something no other technology similar to ours has done so far. But we didn’t have that much contact with the end customer. Although we had very thorough knowledge of what we were doing, and how and when we wanted to do it, we didn’t know how to sell it, or to whom, or what the chain was or who the decision-maker was,” Matías explains.
Legal and communications support and constant guidance have been essential. “All the tools they gave us at Know Hub Ignition were extremely useful for further refining our pitch, because we had a well-structured one for months, to which we kept adding and removing a few things. But then we realized we had to put together something different and go deeper into some topics,” says the full-time entrepreneur.
He also highlights that opportunities arose to sign collaboration agreements with entities he himself describes as partners, including the Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Housing and the Construye 2025 program. “This was a turning point in terms of getting closer to institutions and building alliances and potential customers,” he says, adding that thanks to this they are currently in talks with major paint companies in Chile, “of which there are very few,” he notes.
In fact, a company specializing in painting tennis courts was the first in the industry to bet on Photio. They have already painted a court with the technology, equivalent to 500 m2, that is, a thousand mature trees.
Along with the paint industry, Photio’s other main focus is real estate companies. In fact, during the summer they closed their first deal in this sector. Real estate developer Echeverría Izquierdo painted 250 m2 of its Vanguardia building (located in the district of Macul, in Santiago) with the technology. The developer says it is the “first residential building in Latin America to implement an air-cleaning nanotechnology. As green areas have been disappearing from the city, this pilot allows us to contribute 1,000 trees that help us move toward greater sustainability in the construction industry,” the company posted.
A next step could also be the retail industry. The goal is to sell Photio sachets so anyone can add it to the paints of their choice when they paint their house, for example.
Roads, buildings and murals that clean the air
“By decoupling Photio from paints, we actually decoupled the product entirely, and that gave rise to a series of other possible applications,” Matías explains, stressing that Photio thus went from being a product to a platform that will make it possible to develop many other air-purifying applications.
Literally, the sky is the limit: Photio can be added directly to road asphalt, to plastics used in agribusiness, to air-purifying devices, and much more. In fact, among the first to take advantage of this “platform” were muralists, who combined art and science and added Photio to their very high-quality paints without affecting either their properties or their color.
Right downtown, at the foot of the Torre Entel, you can see one of them, in which Chilean muralist “La Loica” sought to reflect the diversity and multiculturalism that exist throughout Chile. The other is the “equality mural,” considered one of the tallest in the country, painted on the facade of a 26-story building on General Bulnes street in the Yungay neighborhood and created by artist Estefanía (STFI) Leighton. In this way, the team behind Photio has worked with some twenty muralists from different cities across the country.
In addition, Photio has several projects in the pipeline with companies such as Isa Intervial, the Centro Tecnológico para la Innovación en la Construcción and the municipalities of Las Condes and Providencia. The future looks promising, but there is still a lot of work to do. “The next steps are to complete the certifications, which has been a very long road,” says Matías.
But Chile is not their only focus. As winners of the Know Hub Ignition program, Matías and his team are waiting for health conditions to allow them to strengthen their ties with UC Riverside. “California has positioned itself as Silicon Valley, and the networks they have there are tremendous,” says Matías, adding that they continue working online with their mentors from that university, which has a strong focus on science- and technology-based entrepreneurship.
Photio’s co-creator stresses the importance of going beyond our borders, stating that “for us, Chile is a first market that will help us show the product’s potential and raise initial capital, but we believe that with Know Hub Chile and UC Riverside we will be able to do something in the United States, maybe not in 2021, but we will prepare the way.”
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