Building Rhea's Factory: How AI-Designed Enzymes Could Finally Solve Plastic Recycling

Only 10% of the plastic we manufacture gets recycled. We've been trying to solve this for a hundred years using the same mechanical and chemical tools that created the problem. What if biology—specifically, engineered enzymes—is the missing piece?

In this episode of Just Now Possible, Teresa Torres talks with Arzu Sandıkçı (co-founder and CEO) and Mert Topcu (co-founder) of Rhea's Factory, a startup using engineered enzymes and AI to achieve what mechanical recycling can't: breaking plastic all the way back to its original molecular building blocks.

Arzu brings a background in molecular biology and enzyme engineering. Mert brings 20 years in tech, including a decade at Google as a product manager. Together, they've built an AI platform that uses protein language models, multi-step agentic pipelines, and proprietary wet lab data to design novel enzymes that deconstruct plastic polymers into their original monomers—selectively, at low temperatures, and at industrial scale.

You'll hear how they evolved from a human-orchestrated pipeline to an agentic AI scientist, why they sometimes *want* the model to hallucinate, and what it means to explore an enzyme design space that makes everything nature has ever evolved look like a tiny dot.