Founder Spotlight: Linden Schrecker & José Pablo Folch, Co-Founders of Solve Chemistry

📰 Who are you, and what company have you founded?

I'm Linden Schrecker, founder & CEO, and I'm José Pablo Folch, founder & CTO. We are the co-founders of SOLVE Chemistry. We are building the future of how chemicals, drugs and agrochemicals move from the first milligram to commercial production.

🔥 Founder's Spark: Origin, Drive & Identity

What’s your “why” - the moment or realization that set you on this path?

During our PhDs, we focused on self-optimisation of chemical reactions and path constrained Bayesian optimisation. We realised that the chemicals industry didn’t just want optimisation, they wanted scalable transferable insights and lots of accurate data.

Nobody could deliver this. Together, we did.

Was there a single event, book, or experience that fundamentally shaped who you are today?

LS: I wouldn’t point at a single event/book/experience as I think life and thinking is about continual growth and so I continue to be shaped by the people I interact with, what I read, and the world around me every week.

JF: There are many, but I would point towards the moment I decided to move to the UK to study mathematics. Mexico is a very family-oriented society, so leaving was difficult, but I decided that if I really wanted to push the boundaries of science, I needed to take advantage of the opportunities that Imperial offered, in terms of resources, community, and environment. Looking back on my journey, I am very confident I made the right decision.

If you weren’t building this startup, what would you be doing instead?

LS: I’d be working in the organ on a chip space, helping emulate clinical trials to streamline the development of new drugs, especially in areas that are very challenging to set up clinical trials such as babies, pregnant women, and end of life diseases.

JF: I think I would still be working in AI for Science, but perhaps in one of the big tech firms, developing ideas closer to the algorithmic and machine learning side. If working at SOLVE has taught me anything though, is that being closer to the people doing the science in the lab is far more impactful!

🌍 The Mission: What You’re Building & Why It Matters

In one sentence, what problem are you solving - and what happens if we don't?

We are solving how production of drugs and agrochemicals is developed – from the first milligram produced, to commercial compounds entering the market.

What’s the endgame? What does success really look like for your company?

First time right predictive scale-up. Every new, exciting chemical compound scaled up to production scale in a sustainable, cost efficient manner in under a month.

🧪 The Startup Journey: Grit, Decisions & Lessons

Building startups is hard, what keeps you going?

LS: People seem well aligned on the upside of starting a start up but seem to miscalculate downside risk. To me, starting a start up (after I thought about it for a while) does not feel high risk because you are gaining valuable transferable skills which are valuable (personally and professionally) even if the start up were to not work out for whatever reason. Thus my motivation comes from the upside to society and science, not from the fear of failure.

JF: I would agree with Linden completely. We are tackling a massive problem, and wake-up every day to work on a solution that will have a massive impact on society. The journey to get there is full of lessons and learnings, and while it has a lot of struggles, it also has very rewarding and fun moments that also stay with me. To me the biggest decisions are the people and team we chose to work beside us, not just in SOLVE but also investors and collaborators, and I am feeling very excited and confident we have the best people for the task.

🧠 Perspective & Personality: Lighter Touch, Deeper Insight

What’s the best advice you’ve received - and the worst?

LS: Best advice: start doing things.

JF: Best advice - “Even if you take a different path from what you expected, you will always end-up in the right place eventually”. To me, this is about always doing my best and not pondering too much on failures, but to learn from them, keep working at it, and eventually things will go in your favour.

JF: Worst advice - Difficult to pin-point anything specific. But in general advice about being competitive in the workspace and seeing things as a zero-sum game. I am a big believer in collaboration and would not be where I am without so many people that have helped me along the way. Like Linden likes to say about our approach to data, “a rising tide lifts all boats”.

Who’s someone outside the climate world who’s influenced how you think or lead?

LS: Lee Kuan Yew: pragmatic, focussed and decisive at long term/short term trade-offs for the good of his country.

JF: For me it is more personal, I think I’ve had the fortune of having many great mentors and have picked up a few things from all of them.

What’s one opinion you hold that most people in climate tech would disagree with?

LS: Sustainability only sticks if it comes with economic uplift.

JF: I think it is a bit unfair and unreasonable to expect everyone, especially countries and people in worse economic circumstances, to act in a climate-friendly manner. We need to work towards making sustainability the best path for economic growth if we want everyone to abide by it.

🎤 For the Closer: Inspire & Amplify

If you had 30 seconds with every policymaker / investor / student in climate, what would you say?

In an evolving world of AI for Science, great data (and automated data collection) is what powers the ongoing industrial revolution.

How can people help - or get involved?

We’re always looking for the most exciting examples from academia and industry to test our technology on. If you or someone you know has an exciting use case, or a retrospective example you’re interested in we’re keen to hear from you and solve your chemistry now!

Anything else you want to share about the work you’re doing or your hot takes on climate?

We have a highly interdisciplinary team in commercial, product, and research. We’re always adding to our integrated pipeline and would be keen to hear from anyone who thinks they can add to our “full stack chemistry” approach.

How have you found working with Endgame Capital?

We’ve really enjoyed over the journey of having Endgame Capital invest into us that we were getting a lot of value even before the money came into our account. We learnt stuff through the due diligence process we didn’t even know about ourselves already - helping us understand things better.

With Endgame it felt like even if they hadn’t chosen to invest we already would have gained a lot of information by going through the process with them. They had a real want to understand what was going on in our rather deep tech heavy startup, and were happy to dig down into the details to really understand this.