Most people see carbon dioxide as a problem to manage; something to capture, store, or reduce.
Anodyne sees it as an opportunity.
Co-founded by Manou Davies and Iain Evans, Anodyne is redefining what’s possible in chemical manufacturing. Rather than treating CO₂ as waste, they see it as the foundation of a new approach to creating the chemicals that underpin modern life.
“Ninety-six percent of everything we manufacture starts in the chemical industry,” Davies says. “If you want to build sustainability from the ground up—if you want to lay it into the foundation of your products—you start with chemicals.”
That conviction drives Anodyne’s mission: turning captured CO₂ into the essential molecules that shape our world, from cosmetics and textiles to fuels and cleaning products.
With support from NorthX Climate Tech, Anodyne is pioneering the use of engineered enzymes to produce organic chemicals directly from CO₂—showing that biology and electricity together can transform one of our biggest environmental challenges into a new industrial opportunity.
Building sustainability from the ground up
When Davies and Evans founded Anodyne, they set out to tackle two intertwined problems: reducing emissions and decarbonizing the materials that make up our everyday lives.
“Almost everything we use is based on carbon,” Davies explains. “Our clothes, our furniture, our medicines—all of it. But today, we take complex hydrocarbons like oil and coal, break them down using huge amounts of heat and pressure, and then build them back up into the materials we actually need. It’s inefficient, expensive, and destructive.”
Anodyne flips that model. Instead of breaking down fossil feedstocks, the company uses CO₂ itself as a raw material, a cleaner, simpler, and ultimately cheaper approach to producing the building blocks of the global economy.
“CO₂ is the perfect feedstock,” Davies says. “It’s abundant, low-cost, and we’re all looking for something to do with it.”
A new kind of chemistry
To realize that vision, Anodyne turned to bioelectrochemistry, a field that merges the precision of biology with the scalability of electrochemistry.
Traditional chemical production relies on metal catalysts and extreme heat. Biological systems use enzymes and manufacture in batches.
“What we asked ourselves,” Davies recalls, “was whether we could take the best of both worlds. Could we use biology’s precise catalysts, but in a continuous industrial electrochemical system that’s scalable and fast? That question became the foundation of Anodyne.”
The result is a process that replaces metal catalysts with enzymes, powered by renewable electricity to produce organic chemicals from CO₂ with far lower emissions and energy use than conventional methods.
From methanol to formic acid—Anodyne’s unlikely path to saving the bees?
Anodyne’s early work focused on methanol, one of the world’s most widely used chemicals. But as the company scaled its platform, it uncovered an even greater opportunity.
“Formic acid is an intermediate on the path from CO₂ to methanol,” Davies says. “As we worked, we discovered that its economics and carbon reduction potential were actually better than methanol’s.”
Formic acid has many industrial uses—in agriculture, textiles, and manufacturing—but one of its most compelling applications lies in an unconventional use: beekeeping.
Davies explains: “Bee colonies are under threat of collapse because mite populations are rising with increasing temperatures. Formic acid is one of the best miticides, but conventional formic acid has a huge carbon footprint. Low-carbon formic acid would be hugely meaningful to these miticide developers.” She adds, “One of the world’s largest is based in Ontario. It’s a great example of a small Canadian company driving environmental benefits across multiple fronts.”
By producing low-carbon formic acid, Anodyne is creating a solution that supports both industry and ecosystems—reducing emissions while supporting the health of pollinators vital to our food supply.
The NorthX connection
Anodyne’s partnership with NorthX has been instrumental in turning this scientific vision into an industrial reality. Anodyne first received funding in 2024, and their project focused on building the world’s first industrial bio-electric process to produce organic chemicals from CO₂ is now approaching completion.
“Hard technology like this takes real investment,” Davies notes. “We’re not a software company. We need scientists and engineers in labs with equipment, materials, and safety infrastructure. NorthX’s support gave us the ability to prove this could work at scale.”
NorthX’s involvement goes beyond funding. The organization helped Anodyne connect with investors, ecosystem partners, and mentors, supporting the company through early-stage commercialization and into the next phase of growth.
“Early-stage funding is the hardest to come by for deep-tech ventures,” Davies adds. “It’s expensive, and the returns are longer-term generally, but it’s where the real climate impact begins.”
For NorthX, Anodyne’s success is a blueprint for what’s possible when bold innovation meets targeted support: a Canadian company transforming a sticky global emissions challenge into a new economic driver for our nation’s economy.
A vision for the future
Looking ahead, Anodyne aims to scale its platform to produce a wide range of low-carbon chemicals that can decarbonize multiple sectors. Formate is one of the first molecules on this path, but the company’s ambition goes far beyond any single product.
“We want to really change the way the world thinks about chemical production,” Davies says. “Can we revolutionize the chemical industry? That’s the big picture—producing more chemicals at scale, expanding the range of molecules we can make, and bringing together people from diverse backgrounds to build an ecosystem around science for the real world.”
That’s the future Anodyne is building toward: a chemical industry where sustainability begins at the molecular level, CO₂ becomes a cornerstone of clean industrial growth, and new approaches unlock a truly circular, low-carbon economy—with NorthX supporting the journey every step of the way.
