The boss who has found ‘nature's answer to plastic'

Yahoo

25-05-2025

Insiya Jafferjee has always taken an ambitious approach to engineering — ever since she made robots swim across the bathtub as a child.
Fast forward to her burgeoning business career and, last month, she received a Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award at the Royal Opera House for her achievements at Shellworks, a London-based start-up which turns bacteria into biodegradable materials and performs like plastic.
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Standing on stage to receive her award, which celebrates female entrepreneurs of the future, she noted how Madame Clicquot had revolutionised an age-old industry in champagne making and why her company had similar aspirations.
'We're really trying to take on an industry that hasn't been disrupted and doesn't want to be disrupted,' the 33-year-old tells Yahoo Finance UK. 'And you kind of need that naivety outside to be able to do it.'
The Bold Woman judges said they were impressed by Jafferjee and her co-founder Amir Afshar's commitment to building a company that had significant scale since launching in 2019. It has already replaced 40 tonnes of plastic and 1.2 million units of packaging and is on track for £4.5m in revenue in 2025.
'We are very ambitious and we have been quite ruthless about it,' she added. 'People often doubt that what we do is even possible. Proving them wrong at every stage has been my boldest and bravest achievement.'
The company name was born out of initially extracting shellfish waste into a versatile, biodegradable bioplastic.
However the founders, who met at Imperial College, realised from the outset it would be hard to scale and made the first of several pivots into creating the world's first biodegradable material that is durable enough to withstand heat and humidity.
Vivomer, says Jafferjee, is the perfect plastic replacement. A polymer grown by microorganisms that breaks down naturally in any environment, it also has a longer shelf life. Nature's answer to plastic, adds Jafferjee.
'When you look at the fundamental technology, you are able to grow a polymer in the cell of a microorganism and you kind of scale that up using fermentation, similar to what we do for food,' she says.
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'What is amazing is that material, when you take it out of the cell, behaves just like a plastic. But when you put it back into a natural environment, that could be a soil, marine or landfill, it can be degraded by the same microorganisms.
'Amir and I would always say, 'Wouldn't it be amazing if you had a material that did everything that you wanted plastic to do, but only when you threw it away, it would degrade'. When we found something like this, we really tried to understand why it hasn't been scaled because it is really the true solution to plastic.'
Making materials from shellfish waste saw unique headlines which left the start-up fielding several hundred enquiries a day. In 2023, they had also around 200 largely smaller brand customers in its pipeline and paused most of their operations.
Shellworks, which employs around 20 staff, then spent six weeks calling every industry to gauge where it could pivot and accrue faster close rates.
'I don't know anything other than trying to do like 200 million units in 12 months right out of the gate and very high quality,' admits Jafferjee.
Hailing from Sri Lanka, resilience has also played its part in being able to deal with risk and pressure in business — the business suffered a fire in 2021 and had to restart operations by purchasing machines at auction — and leveraging her skill set.
'The environment itself forces you to be quite resilient because we've always gone through hardship and grew up during a war, the economy is always on and off and nothing is ever certain,' she says.
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As is Jafferjee's wont, she has focused on fast growth thanks to a background in large-scale manufacturing and operations, having interned at Ford (F) and worked at Apple (AAPL) for nearly three years before moving to London and setting up Shellworks.
'I used to have this frustration with Apple where they have such incredible people, but I always felt like we're leveraging these people to make a product versus being able to do something that's really world-changing.'
Shellworks still had to overcome scepticism as to whether their production was 'truly green', but they now partner with major retailers including Tesco (TSCO.L) and Boots and count companies such as Wild Cosmetics, which was purchased by Unilever (ULVR.L) recently, as a client.
The latter could also be a game-changer for Shellworks as it aims to hit £10m revenue come 2026, having received around £7.5m in funding from global investors.
'I really do think it is scale that enables us to actually truly compete with petrochemical plastic, because they operate on such a great magnitude than we do,' says Jafferjee.
'I think a lot of people know for a long time that plastics have kind of been vilified in terms of consumers hating it, it's a material and everyone wants to get rid of it."
The entrepreneur says that Shellworks remains naive and sometimes overestimates what it can achieve as a biotech start-up.
Yet optimism abounds, just as her Bold Future award showcases. 'But we always shoot for the moon and then hope that we can meet it,' she adds.
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