AKIN

AKIN is developing an enzyme-powered rubber biorefinery platform to achieve genuine rubber circularity through the production of recycled virgin-grade materials. Europe generates 3.5 million tons of tire waste a year, yet fewer than 13% reach high-value recycling due to a critical quality gap. Current methods destroy molecular integrity, limiting recovered materials to low-value applications. AKIN provides the breakthrough: our rubber-degrading enzyme preserves molecular quality while breaking down tires into high-value rubber fractions and co-products, achieving 35% revenue uplift for recyclers. Additionally, our pioneering imaging technology delivers quality verification, enabling manufacturers to reincorporate recycled materials confidently. Our dual approach is the only one addressing both sides of circularity in this industry.

Main focus
Industrial biotech- AKIN's Rubber BioRefine platform uses enzymatic processes to recover virgin-equivalent rubber, carbon black, and isoprenoids from end-of-life tires.

What makes your technology unique?
AKIN combines molecular-level imaging with enzymatic recovery to upgrade end-of-life tire rubber into a virgin-equivalent material, not just downcycled granulate, but a like-for-like substitute, alongside recovered carbon black and high-value isoprenoids as co-products. While most rubber recycling stops at mechanical shredding, our enzymatic step breaks down the polymer chains that make recycled rubber inconsistent and unreliable as an ingredient. And because we integrate at the end of existing recycling lines rather than building new facilities, the technology is deployable sooner, on brownfield infrastructure, at low additional CapEx.

Main product(s)
We provide Rubber Biorefine Imaging and Recovery platforms. Biorefine Imaging is a molecular imaging service, which enables rubber product manufacturers incroporate sustainable materials with higher confidence. AKIN's Rubber BioRefine platform, aimed at recyclers as licensees, produces three outputs from end-of-life tire rubber:
- Virgin-equivalent rubber: a direct substitute for virgin material in rubber compounding, free of the quality inconsistency that limits recycled rubber today.
- Recovered carbon black: reinforcing-grade carbon black recovered from the tire matrix, with a far smaller footprint than furnace-produced grades.
- High-value isoprenoids: a feedstock stream for applications like adhesives, asphalt modifiers, and specialty chemicals, not otherwise recovered in the current recycling value chain.