At the end of the 17th Unicamp Ventures Annual Meeting, which took place yesterday (20) night, the executive director of the Innovation Agency of the State University of Campinas (Inova Unicamp), professor Ana Frattini, announced that Guilherme Borelli, biologist and CEO of FoxES, was chosen by the evaluation panel as the University's Entrepreneur of the Year 2022. The recognition is one of the main categories of the Unicamp Entrepreneur Award, which is in its sixth edition and is organized by Inova Unicamp and the Unicamp Ventures group of entrepreneurs.
“This was another important recognition that allows us to remember and celebrate all the efforts that enabled our team of scientists to develop ways to continue acting, even in the face of all the challenges imposed by the pandemic, creating solutions that could meet Brazilian demand and help others laboratories to maintain their accurate diagnostic performance. We remain firm in our aim to expand molecular biology in Brazil”, celebrated Guilherme.
On the occasion, the professor commented on the entrepreneur's performance and strategic vision in preparing for the possible demand for clinical trials to address the Covid-19 pandemic before it arrived in Brazil. This allowed the company to supply itself with the necessary material to supply the Brazilian market and serve 300 people with RT-qPCR tests, a variation of the PCR method, to diagnose the disease.
“It was a very difficult choice, because we were very well represented among the four finalists. But Guilherme had a crucial difference for the moment we were living in: he had courage! Courage to pivot his business, which was dedicated to the ethanol market and genetics and molecular biology in animals, to work with human exams and serve the country during the height of the pandemic. He noticed opportunities and changed the direction of the company's business to carry out all these tests quickly and cheaply, in addition to supplying the market with Brazilian inputs”, explained the executive director of Inova.
The daughter company was also awarded as a highlight in the Largest Growth (Scale-up) category. Since the company was founded in 2018, the startup has experienced leaps in revenue, with growth of 185% in 2019, 3.650% in 2020, 126% in 2021. It should close 2022 with 10% growth compared to the previous year. This means that, in 2022, FoxES recorded 257 times greater growth compared to 2018 revenue. The biggest jump in 2020 was influenced by the company's expertise along with the demand for clinical tests to detect covid-19 and the startup's capacity in serve the market, as Borelli explains.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, we saw so-called developed countries block exports of essential inputs for Covid-19 tests. Understanding our social role and the historical importance of the moment, FoxES focused its efforts on offering RT-qPCR analysis. At the same time, the production of its own inputs, independent of imports, became an obsession of the company”, recalls the entrepreneur.
One month after the start of the pandemic in Brazil, FoxES obtained a health license from Anvisa and accreditation from the Adolfo Lutz Institute to serve patients from the Unified Health System (SUS) and the private system with its own supplies. Unicamp's daughter company served the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Goiás with exams without limitations and at a low price compared to those offered on the market.
“We won bids and donated around 20 thousand tests, approximately two million reais, to serve needy and indigenous communities in specific projects. Furthermore, the startup managed to reduce the maximum delivery time for exams from 4 working days to 12 hours. It also offered, in a pioneering way, a less cumbersome analysis, using saliva tests, which is accepted even on international trips”, explained the biologist.
FoxES's entrepreneurial trajectory at Unicamp Founded in 2018, FoxES is an academic spin-off from Unicamp whose mission is to be a bridge between the technical knowledge produced at the University and the market, especially with regard to Molecular Biology techniques for analysis of genetic material from various organisms, which initially was not human, but from sugar cane.
The company's history is intrinsically related to the trajectory of Guilherme Borelli, co-founder of the startup, together with Marcus Vinicius Gonçalves, a mathematician trained at the Institute of Mathematics, Statistics and Scientific Computing (Imecc) at Unicamp. In addition to being a biologist, Guilherme is a Master and PhD student in the Genetics and Molecular Biology program at the Institute of Biology (IB) at Unicamp. “During my master’s degree, I took an entrepreneurship course in IB Life Sciences because I have always been interested in startups. And researcher Welbe Bragança, from the Genomics and Bioenergy Laboratory (LGE) at IB, commented to me about a Unicamp patent in which I was already involved with Professor Gonçalo Pereira. Everything fell into place, and I had the idea of starting a business with this technology”, recalls the biologist.
With the intention of working with Unicamp's patent aimed at the ethanol plant market, the group decided to participate in the 2019 Unicamp Challenge, a business modeling competition based on University technologies, which is organized by Inova Unicamp. They chose to model the IB technology, which they would license in 2021. “When we participated in the Unicamp Challenge, we had already created our company and wanted to use the technology developed at IB. The business model that we developed based on the Challenge's capabilities varied little from what we operate today with this technology. After licensing, in 2021, we have some permanent customers in the field of ethanol plants”, comments Guilherme.
Today, the startup makes up the Gene Solux group, another daughter company of Unicamp, and has placed three more FoxES spin-off companies on the market: Micro Forge, which operates in the chemical industry and produces laboratory inputs; FoxTrot, which is a transporter of biological materials; and AdMe, which is responsible for the administrative side of the group's companies, so that they can only dedicate themselves to their core business.
With the growth of the company, which has its headquarters based in the city of Paulínia, this year FoxES opened a new unit in São José dos Pinhais, a municipality close to Curitiba, in Paraná, with the aim of reaching new Brazilian markets. Including FoxES and its spin-offs, the company directly and indirectly employs more than 100 people, more than 80% of whom have higher education at an undergraduate, master's or doctorate level. “It is worth mentioning that, as it is a clinical analysis laboratory, highly regulated by Anvisa, it is mandatory that technical employees have at least technical training”, explains Borelli about the staff.
Article originally published on the Inova Unicamp Innovation Agency website.
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