Meet the Texas startup that wants to decarbonize the chemical industry

Solugen, a startup that has set itself up with no less lofty a goal than the decarbonization of a massive chunk of the petrochemical industry, may be the first legitimate multi-million-dollar company to start out in a meth lab. When company co-founders Gaurab Chakrabarti and Sean Hunt began hunting for a lab to test their process for enzymatically manufacturing hydrogen peroxide, they only had a small $10,000 grant from MIT -- which was supposed to pay their salaries and cover rent and lab equipment. Chakrabarti, who now jokingly calls himself "the Heisenberg of hydrogen peroxide," says that the lab spaces they looked at initially were all too pricey, so through a friend of a friend of a friend, he and Hunt wound up leasing lab space in a facility near the Houston airport for $150 per month.