Meet The Entrepreneurs Who Designed Pollution-Killing Plants

Meet The Entrepreneurs Who Designed Pollution-Killing Plants

In a lab in Paris, Lionel Mora and Patrick Torbey have been designing a houseplant that can remove pollutants from indoor air, where volatile organic compounds like formaldehyde are a danger to human health. After four years of work, their company, Neoplants, is emerging from stealth Thursday with its first bioengineered houseplant, the Neo P1, which it says can remove 30 times more pollutants than a typical houseplant. Future versions, they believe, could be designed to get rid of even more. "We call them plants with a purpose," Mora, the company's CEO, told Forbes in an interview in New York. "I don't see anything more important than building a more sustainable future." Over the past decade, scores of synthetic biology companies have cropped up with the goal of designing better, more sustainable products thanks to biology, a trend that the Biden Administration's recent biomanufacturing initiative hopes to accelerate. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic has made indoor air quality more important for consumers and businesses. Companies like R-Zero, which Forbes profiled in August, are using disinfecting light to clean inside air and have made progress selling their technology to schools and offices. Since its 2018 founding, Neoplants has raised $20 million in