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About
erthos was founded in 2019 by Nuha Siddiqui, Kritika Tyagi and Chang Dong out of the University of Toronto. Its original model was manufacturing bio-resins and bio-additives from a Mississauga warehouse as drop-in alternatives to single-use plastics and cosmetic packaging. That business ran into four walls at once: market feedback that wasn't venture scale, policy that kept moving — Canada banned compostables — economics that didn't survive setting up manufacturing across geographies, and the plain difficulty of displacing cheap plastics that work well. The company kept the mission and changed the method, moving to ZYA, an AI-driven platform for designing bio-based resins that run inside existing manufacturing systems, sold through licensing rather than by shipping resin. Head of growth Jill Watson, who had backed the seed round as an investor at Golden Ventures before joining, told a TechTO audience in 2024 that the new approach accelerates biomaterial development roughly fivefold.
Backers
Horizons Ventures led the $6.5M Series A; Golden Ventures backed the earlier seed round.
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Quick answers
What does erthos do?
It designs plant-based alternatives to petroleum plastics. Rather than manufacturing and selling resin itself, it now licenses an AI-assisted design platform so consumer-goods and chemical companies can develop biomaterials that work in the production lines they already run.
Who founded erthos?
Nuha Siddiqui, Kritika Tyagi and Chang Dong, at the University of Toronto in 2019.
Why did erthos change its business model?
Selling bio-resin directly wasn't going to be a venture-scale business. Policy kept shifting — Canada banned compostables — the economics of manufacturing across geographies didn't work, and displacing cheap plastics that perform well proved very hard. The company kept the mission of reducing plastic dependence and changed how it gets there.