Ladder17 host Megan Thomas is joined by Damien Perriman, CCO of eXoZymes, to talk about eXoZymes origins as a platform biotechnology company to a product-led business. Damien pulls back the curtain on the science behind their metabolic health nutraceutical, the realities of navigating an IPO, and the go-to-market strategy powering their next phase of growth.

Listen on Apple Podcast or on the Ladder17 website.

Podcast transcript
This transcript was automatically generated using OpusClip + Claude.

MEGAN: Welcome to FoodTech Stories. I'm your host, Megan Thomas, a marketing and communications expert focused on how emerging technology is adopted in food and agriculture. On each episode, we talk with leaders, innovators, and storytellers who are shaping the future of our food and food system. If you value our content, please consider subscribing.

Today my guest is Damian Perriman, who is Chief Commercial Officer for eXoZymes. Welcome to the podcast, Damian.

DAMIAN: Thanks, Megan. Good day.

MEGAN: Tell us more about how you got started in your career.

DAMIAN: Maybe my accent might give it away a little bit — I grew up in Australia, which you don't encounter all the time. There's a few of us scattered around. I actually grew up in the Outback of Australia, so growing up I was always exposed to this importance of using resources wisely, because in the Outback you don't have a lot to work with. I think it's not surprising for my career that I should be in a role where I can commit myself to renewables and to sustainability.

There was a formational part of my career when I joined Dow AgroSciences and Dow Chemical. It was at a time when a new focus was going into renewables — what role would it play for the future of petrochemistry and the future of big ag? That kind of formed a lot of the foundational thoughts I had for how the world was going to embrace this really important and necessary change.

MEGAN: And when did you move to the States?

DAMIAN: I moved to the States right around 2000, just after the Sydney Olympics, which was massive — it was beautiful, it was incredible. I was charged up coming out of university. The idea that I could have my own Olympic moment by taking my career and just going overseas.

MEGAN: I remember watching those Olympics. They were beautiful. What led you to Exozymes, and tell us how long you've been there.

DAMIAN: I've been with eXoZymes for just on a year now. For me, this was about trying to find a way to make more impact with biology and biotechnology. I'd spent the previous 20 years working in synthetic biology and green chemistry, developing disruptive methods to use biology to make products that we need in everyday life. The challenge we would run into again and again was scale.

I was fortunate enough to have been able to bring a few products and technologies to market, but we buried a lot of our colleague companies along the way — companies that just didn't have that persistence, didn't have the right capital structure, or simply ran out of runway. What that teaches you — maybe in a post-traumatic way — is that if you're a tech company or a startup that doesn't have a laser-like focus on getting to market quickly and generating an investor return, then what game are you in?

What brought me to eXoZymes was seeing a technology that could marry into this strategy of moving fast. It isn't a company that wants to go and solve the world's biggest problem. It wants to solve a meaningful problem, but we want to do it quickly, because that's how we'll generate a return for our investors. And Megan, if there's one takeaway for tech when it comes to this whole space: when you delight your investors, they might invest again in the next thing. If you don't delight them, they're taking their money and walking. We have to make sure that more investment comes into this category, because everything we do is incredibly meaningful for the future of this Earth and for the future of civilization as we know it.

MEGAN: Can you explain what eXoZymes does in terms its technology?

DAMIAN: We take enzymes out of a living cell and make them operate as a pathway completely free of the cell's regulatory environment. It's like a cascade — that pathway takes a relatively benign and simple biomass feedstock and goes through multiple conversions to create a complex yet important molecule at the end of that pathway.

By taking it out of the cell, the cell no longer needs to make all of these byproducts, and the cell is not focused on growing. The cell is not fighting you to get productivity into your pathway — you can just focus on the pathway. Being able to focus just on the pathway removes one of the key bottlenecks we encountered so frequently before when scaling things up. What the company is doing is unleashing these pathways on a whole new broad catalog of interesting pharmaceutical and nutraceutical products that we can develop very, very quickly.

MEGAN: And do you think of yourselves as a product company or a platform company?

DAMIAN: I think we started as a platform company — many companies do, because the first thing you discover is, "Hey, we've got a breakthrough. What do we do with it?" While we figure that out, we'll be a platform company. A lot of early investors want to invest in a platform company because they know that if the first product doesn't hit, there's an opportunity to build more products. A platform company is also there to possibly service other people's needs.

I was attracted to eXoZymes because it was right at the defining point of transitioning out of being a platform and into being a products company. My thesis, if I want to take investor money, is: I want to take that money and I want to unleash a product. When you can put something in people's hands, or inside their body, you're going to make an impact that can be measured. You're going to create something that there is a real market pull for. You don't get that with a platform — you only get that with products.

Where eXoZymes is today is very much a products company, with a lead product in the metabolic health nutraceutical category, and we've got other candidates in the pipeline — like fragrances and other nutraceuticals — that we're really excited about.

MEGAN: And what can you tell us about that metabolic health product?

DAMIAN: About a year ago, almost to the day, we started working on a new process to make a compound called NCT. NCT is one of these hard-to-make natural products that exists only in vanishingly small amounts in nature, but has been the subject of some preclinical studies by research groups who appreciate its role in regulating a really important metabolic switch — one that controls mitochondrial function and growth.

Here's a compound that we already knew has desirable performance for treating conditions like obesity and fatty liver disease, established in the preclinical setting, but it never got commercialized because no one could figure out how to make it. As we look at our industry, we try to understand what molecules the world needs — not just today but in the future — and find really efficient, sustainable, and investment-worthy approaches to actually getting to those molecules.

MEGAN: Are you focused on the US market, or how wide is your focus?

DAMIAN: I think we're only limited by how many hours we can spend on a plane. When you think about a compound like NCT serving the nutraceutical metabolic health market — nutraceuticals are a very strong market in the United States, but addressing metabolic health and wellness is a global issue. It's easy to have partnering conversations domestically, but when we go to conferences and meet with people, it's a theme that everyone is interested in. We're a global company, really only limited by how much money we can spend on travel and time on the plane.

MEGAN: Time can be that limiting constraint, 100%. Unlike many of the firms I have the opportunity to speak with, eXoZymes is a publicly traded company. Why did the company's leadership decide to take the company public?

DAMIAN: I joined the company just after the IPO. This is after about 20 years of being in the venture-backed world, where everything you dreamed of was reaching a certain level of maturity where you can go IPO, create that liquidity, and everyone celebrates — you get to take a breather and try it all over again.

For eXoZymes, the IPO was not the end of the journey; it was the beginning. Why did we go IPO instead of taking the venture route? When you're in the public markets, your investors are along for the ride with you every day. They can see exactly what you're doing. They can make decisions about whether they want to stay in or get out. That kind of real-time accountability actually forces a discipline on the company that I find very healthy. It's harder to be loose with your strategy when the market is watching you every day.

MEGAN: That's a great point. Let's talk a little about the technology more deeply. Can you walk us through more of the science behind the cell-free enzyme pathway system?

DAMIAN: Sure. So the magic here is that in a living cell, the cell has its own agenda. The cell wants to grow, it wants to survive, and it has all of these regulatory mechanisms to ensure it does that. When you're trying to use a cell as a factory to make a specific molecule, the cell is constantly fighting your objective. It diverts resources. It produces byproducts. It regulates the very enzymes you're trying to use to make your product.

What we do is take those enzymes out of the cell entirely and put them to work in a controlled environment. Think of it like taking the workers out of a busy city — where there's traffic, there are rules, there are competing priorities — and putting them in a clean, quiet workshop where they can just focus on the job at hand. In that environment, they work faster and cleaner, and the output is exactly what you want with far fewer impurities.

The other beautiful thing about this approach is that we can now apply AI tools to really understand what enzymes do what, how to sequence them optimally, and how to tune the conditions of the cascade to get maximum yield. That's rapidly increasing the cycle times on which we're moving towards the desired outcome.

But here's the big takeaway for me — as a chemist, that's where my grounding is. The first time we ran this product at pilot scale and I saw the GC-MS trace of the composition — to see what type of impurity profile we had with the material — we had a single product peak. It wasn't a mishmash of other stuff; it was just one peak. And I was like, "Did someone make that up?" I've never seen something like that before.

I've had to fight against byproducts, against derivatives that get formed in the downstream recovery chemistry. To see a single, super clean peak made sense knowing that it's essentially a catalytic reaction happening through a sequence of enzymes. In my experience scaling up fermentation-based systems for many years, you get to scale and you discover an impurity that causes everything to smell bad, or you get an impurity that turns everything yellow. You're fighting against all of these impurities and byproducts. Not having that was like our life just got so much easier.

MEGAN: I would have to say that you are the first person I've had as a guest who grew up in the Outback. As you mentioned, that's a unique and rugged environment. How do you think that experience shaped how you lead today?

DAMIAN: I dare you to find another Australian who grew up in the Outback — they're around, I'm related to several of them! It taught us a little bit of irreverence for the status quo. When you're in an environment where you don't have access to unlimited resources, you don't have exposure to every opportunity, and you're not working with the systems that work elsewhere, you tend to feel like you're just going to make it up.

I feel most comfortable designing a system than learning a system. That can seem inefficient, but it's where the best creativity happens. Growing up in the Outback conditions you to be a little irreverent towards the status quo. We're not afraid to tear it down and build it back up again — we're happiest when doing so.

MEGAN: What a great mindset to have when you're involved in a scaling startup. Who knows what's around the corner!

DAMIAN: Exactly. You sit across the boardroom table from the partners you're trying to build relationships with, or the investors you're speaking to, and they're imagining what incredible poise this person has — what patience and wisdom. No, we're just sitting there plotting how we're going to tear it down and build it back up again.

MEGAN: That's so funny. What do you see ahead for the biotech, agtech, and food tech sectors writ large?

DAMIAN: Being in industrial biotechnology for as long as I have, it was always this vision of marrying agriculture to the chemical industry — taking petroleum out of the picture and marrying these two worlds together. We struggled so much early on just creating a common language whereby the feedstocks side could talk to the chemicals side: "These are the types of feedstocks we can make at these price points — they can unlock this type of biology." On the chemical side, we were used to pricing and buying feedstocks in a different way, and we were looking for specific functionality. Connecting those two dots took a lot of people and a lot of coming together to create that common language.

When I first started pitching metabolic engineering to make chemicals to the industry at large, I probably did 150 non-disclosure agreements in an 18-month period. Everyone wanted to know what it was going to do, but no one really understood what to do with it. Today, you wouldn't need to do that, because every big company has a department of its own to understand how to engineer biology to make products. It's such a commonplace function these days.

What I see as the potential going forward is this: being able to rapidly turn the R&D engine to get to solutions much more quickly means the investment needed to do it has come down by an order of magnitude. Product opportunities we can be thinking about don't have to be so massive in their impact. You don't need the volume to pay back your investment in R&D.

That now means we can start looking at a whole class of really interesting molecules that were previously underserved. And I think the best place to go looking is among natural molecules that we already know do something — because a lot of people have studied nature to look for active biological materials to solve one problem or another, but couldn't do anything with it because there wasn't a method of making those materials. Natural means there's a pathway to make them, and we can take them into a cell-free system to make them. They've been heavily studied, and we find the ones with unique performance features that will create a valuable solution — if you can make it. That's what we go after.

They don't have to be biofuels with massive global impact and volume, because the R&D cycle cost is now an order of magnitude smaller than it once was. This is a turning point for our industry — our ability to serve really interesting, molecule-driven business cases in spaces that people haven't looked at before.

MEGAN: That's a very insightful answer about what's ahead for the sector. I found that very enlightening, Damian.

DAMIAN: Thank you. And hopefully we can command a good share of it. There are so many natural products out there that we know do something but haven't been able to make. The more the merrier, because it's going to do nothing but float the industry at large. And as biotech has advanced and AI applications have advanced, it really is that unique inflection point where we can start to change how some of these things happen — both in terms of the ability to do it and certainly the time aspect as well.

Can you imagine, back in those days I was describing — when we were trying to get the biologists to talk to the chemists and trying to create that common language — if we'd had AI tools then? That would've been one meeting done. "Okay, now we can talk to one another," instead of years.

MEGAN: Yeah, absolutely. I worked with a company that was working on a pitless cherry. To do it through conventional breeding would have taken 100 years, but with emerging CRISPR technology it can be done potentially in about 10 to 15 years. Isn't that amazing?

DAMIAN: I once met a guy who'd been working on sugarcane traits down in Brazil. We were at a banquet celebrating one of the traits he started working on as a PhD student — it was finally being deployed in the field for the very first time. And it was also his retirement party. It was a big celebration.

MEGAN: I bet he was excited. That's a great story — literally a life's work.

DAMIAN: Literally a life's work.

MEGAN: How can people find out more about the work of eXoZymes?

DAMIAN: Come look at us on LinkedIn — we spend a lot of our airtime pushing stories, comments, and content out via LinkedIn. Our NASDAQ stock ticker is EXOZ — E-X-O-Z — as my colleagues like to say. Check that out; it's a great way of following what we're doing and what we're saying. Plus our website: E-X-O-Z-Y-M-E-S dot com.

And "exozymes" is our new vernacular because we're a company that engineers enzymes, but we engineer them to function outside of — exo — the cell. Hence, exozymes. Very descriptive.

MEGAN: Well, I really enjoyed meeting you at Future FoodTech in San Francisco last month, and thank you for joining the FoodTech Stories podcast. I enjoyed our conversation.

DAMIAN: Thanks for having me.

MEGAN: Thanks for joining us today on the latest episode of FoodTech Stories. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcast platform and keep an eye out for our biweekly episodes. I'm your host Megan Thomas, founder of Ladder17. FoodTech Stories is edited by TJG Media.

eXoZymes Safe Harbor
This content includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements, which are based on certain assumptions and describe the company’s future plans, strategies and expectations, can generally be identified by the use of forward-looking terms such as “believe,” “expect,” “may,” “will,” “should,” “would,” “could,” “seek,” “intend,” “plan,” “goal,” “project,” “estimate,” “anticipate,” “strategy,” “future,” “likely,” “potential,” or other comparable terms, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. All statements other than statements of historical facts included in this content regarding the company’s strategies, prospects, financial condition, operations, costs, plans and objectives are forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially for a variety of reasons. You should carefully consider the risks and uncertainties described in the “Risk Factors” section of eXoZymes’ quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, annual reports on Form 10-K, and other documents filed by eXoZymes from time to time by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These filings identify and address important risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date they are made. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements, and eXoZymes assumes no obligation and does not intend to update or revise these forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. eXoZymes does not give any assurance that it will achieve its expectations.

Ladder17 podcast: How eXoZymes is Scaling as a Public Company