Zimri Henshaw graduated high school six years ago with his heart set on becoming a designer of jackets made from leather alternatives. Not long after, he decided better would be forming a business to sell that petrochemical-free material to fashion brands.
But after starting his biotech company Bucha Bio in 2019 in his dorm room, he hit on a bigger goal: Developing a plant-based, sustainable, customizable material that can be used instead of everything from leather to latex, selling it to car manufacturers, interior design companies and fashion brands, among others. He’s now an old man of 22.
Zimri Henshaw
Henshaw was a military brat, growing up all over the world. But he spent his high school years in Japan, where he discovered he was interested in fashion. His goal was to design fashion-forward leather-like jackets, but without using leather. After moving to Philadelphia to attend Temple University, he started searching for materials and came across kombucha SCOBY, a rubbery ingredient used in the fermentation of a drink called kombucha.
It seemed a good fit. But Henshaw couldn’t find someone to produce it. So he decided to switch gears and focus on making the material, selling it to fashion brands, instead of becoming a designer. In 2019, he started a company while still in college, growing sheets of kombucha SCOBY and drying them out in his dorm room. “I created the first sheets of materials underneath my roommate’s bed,” he says.
While still a senior, Henshaw was accepted into SOSV’s IndieBio accelerator in New York City. Then he graduated from college and moved back to New York.
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A Bigger Scope
He also began expanding his ambitions for the company. The original target—fashion brands looking for a leather substitute—evolved to become much broader in scope: creating what Henshaw describes as “a new category of materials,” for a larger spectrum of companies. That means material that, for example, glows in the dark, has unique textures or is of a variety of thicknesses.
Along with adjusting his sights on a larger market, Henshaw refined his material with more than 20 iterations, searching for something with the potential to be more easily scaled. Now he focuses on composite materials, using a renewable bacterial-nanocellulose as an ingredient in what he calls a “library” of biopolymers.
The business model is for the company to remain as the creator of the formulation, outsourcing production and working with customers to produce materials onsite. That’s partly because the company doesn’t have the resources to be a manufacturer. But it’s also because Henshaw wants to draw a clear demarcation line defining Bucha Bio as a biotech company. Plus he figures that handing production over to other, bigger companies, will allow the startup to develop a significantly larger reach, with a greater environmental impact.
Apparel and Dashboards
The target market includes luxury brands, plus more sports-oriented apparel companies aimed at younger consumers interested in cutting edge textures or capabilities. But Henshaw is also focused on automotive companies, which can use his materials for not just seats and steering wheels, but also in everything from dashboards to mid panels.
At the moment, the company has “more than a dozen” prototypes in production at various fashion, car and interior design companies, according to Henshaw.
In addition to a $250,000 investment from SOSV, Henshaw recently raised $550,000 from New Climate Ventures, along with other VCs and angel investors.
