Neoplants, a French-based startup, has raised $20M to create a plant designed to rid your home of pollutants.
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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:08 So Neo P1 is our first product.
00:10 It's a house plant that we have bioengineered
00:12 to enable it not only to capture the four main pollutants you
00:16 can find in your home, but to use them as a carbon source,
00:19 to recycle them, if you will.
00:21 The first one, formaldehyde, is present in a lot of the products
00:25 that we have, every piece of furniture, every paint,
00:30 even though there are more and more paints that
00:32 try not to work with it.
00:33 Benzene is usually coming from combustion.
00:36 So at the moment, there's a lot of wildfires
00:39 happening a bit everywhere, especially in Canada.
00:42 One of the pollutants that is emitted from those wildfires
00:45 is actually benzene.
00:46 So you don't only find it indoors.
00:49 You actually also find it outdoors.
00:51 From combustion, it can be, in this case, from wildfires,
00:54 but it can also be from cars.
00:56 Our plant is able to purify the air from two different ways.
01:00 The first way is really through the plant itself
01:03 and its own metabolism.
01:05 How does it work?
01:06 We basically insert new lines of DNA within the plant
01:10 to enable it not only to capture more efficiently the pollutants
01:14 that we target, but to use them as a carbon source.
01:18 So it turns those nasty compounds and pollutants
01:23 into water, sugar, and oxygen that it then
01:26 uses to create plant matter.
01:27 That's number one.
01:29 Number two is the microbiome, so the microorganisms that
01:34 live outside and inside the plant.
01:36 This can happen at the leaf level,
01:38 but also, and very importantly, at the root
01:41 level within the substrate.
01:43 If you want to maintain its performance at the highest
01:45 level, you will need to add it again every month
01:49 to a month and a half.
01:50 This is what we will recommend.
01:52 Right now, the bedroom is the space that we are targeting.
01:56 It's about 13 square meters.
01:58 We have added a water reservoir to the plant
02:02 so that you don't have to take care of it,
02:04 and you can leave it for 15 up to 20 days without watering it,
02:10 and there will be no problem.
02:11 If we look at air purifiers today,
02:16 and we start putting Neo P1 next to that,
02:20 most air purifiers on the market cannot tackle VOCs,
02:24 volatile organic compounds.
02:25 These pollutants are, one, extremely small,
02:30 and a lot of the existing solutions out there
02:33 work on chemistry, and they work perfectly fine if you put them
02:37 in perfect conditions.
02:38 In the home, the chemical reactions often
02:41 are partial, which creates byproducts that very often are
02:44 even worse than the pollutants you try to eliminate
02:48 in the first place.
02:49 Today, we have raised $20 million.
02:52 We are very fortunate to be backed by world-class
02:54 investors.
02:56 We have great funds out of Silicon Valley,
02:59 including True Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Builders
03:03 VC.
03:03 We also have fantastic European funds backing us.
03:08 Neo P1 will cost $179 US.
03:11 That's going to be the starting retail price point.
03:14 It will be available only on neoplands.com to start with,
03:18 and people will be able to pre-order new batches of Neo P1
03:22 in Q4 this year.
03:25 (upbeat music)
03:27 you