When the founders of Vancouver’s Tydra Labs began exploring how waste streams could become valuable new materials, chitin was not the original plan.
The team initially intended to extract proteins from waste and turn them into fibres for textiles and apparel. But customer interviews and economic modelling pointed to a more promising opportunity hiding within the process.
“After dozens of customer interviews and a lot of techno-economic modeling, we realized the most valuable part of the process wasn’t the protein at all,” Tydra Labs co-founder and COO Jaiya Varshney told Techcouver. “It was the byproduct, chitin.”
That discovery prompted Tydra to pivot away from textiles and focus on producing high-performance chitin biomaterials capable of replacing synthetic ingredients.
Its flagship ingredient, TYDRA ONE, is cultivated from plant-based food streams, making it vegan and independent of seafood harvesting. Unlike conventional dried chitin products, it remains hydrated and fibrillated, preserving a natural fibrous structure that can provide thickening, emulsification, film formation, moisture management and antimicrobial properties.
Tydra sees potential applications across cosmetics, agriculture, packaging and biomedical products. But the company has selected cosmetics as its first market, giving it an opportunity to demonstrate performance and establish commercial credibility before expanding.
“We think of Tydra as a platform, not a single product,” Varshney said. “The functions that make TYDRA ONE valuable in cosmetics, such as emulsion stability, active delivery, barrier forming and antimicrobial performance, are some of the same functions that matter across applications.”
The startup is now moving beyond laboratory validation. Tydra recently received $600,000 from Vancouver-based climate technology catalyst NorthX to help advance its technology toward pilot manufacturing.
The funding will support stronger manufacturing capabilities, deeper customer relationships and the infrastructure required for commercialization. Tydra is also using technical validation and performance data to secure letters of intent, material transfer agreements and strategic relationships across manufacturing, formulation and market access.
The NorthX backing follows the $1.2-million financing round Techcouver reported on earlier this year.
As Tydra scales, protecting the intellectual property behind its material and manufacturing process is becoming an important part of its strategy.
For a deep-tech company, however, that does not mean attempting to patent every discovery. Tydra evaluates whether an innovation is best protected through a patent or maintained as confidential know-how.
“We start with one question: what would be hardest for someone else to replicate, and how is it best protected?” Varshney explained. “Some innovations are strongest as patents, because they can be clearly defined and enforced. Others are better kept as trade secrets, especially know-how that lives in how we make our material and can’t be reverse-engineered from the final product.”
Tydra focuses its protection on the core platform, including the material itself and how it is produced, rather than tying its intellectual property to a single application. The company can then add application-specific protection as it learns more about how TYDRA ONE performs in individual markets.
It is also protecting the TYDRA brand broadly so it can accompany the company into new industries.
“The flexibility is there, but focus is what makes it real,” Varshney said. “Proving performance and building customer trust in one category first gives us the credibility, data and revenue to expand with confidence instead of spreading ourselves too thin.”
Tydra has worked with Vancouver intellectual property firm Oyen Wiggs as it considers how to protect the platform while preserving room for the business to evolve.
“Oyen Wiggs has been a valuable resource as we’ve thought through how to protect Tydra’s technology as the company grows,” Varshney said. “For an emerging deep-tech company, it’s important to work with IP counsel that understands both the science and the realities of building a startup, including how and when to protect different aspects of the technology while preserving flexibility as the business evolves.”
Varshney said a clear intellectual property strategy is often a baseline expectation for deep-tech investors. It can demonstrate that a company has created something genuinely novel, but it is only one component of a compelling investment case.
“What investors really want to know is whether the technology works, whether customers want it and whether the team can scale it,” she said.
For other university spinouts, Varshney recommends seeking professional IP guidance early while being deliberate about when to begin filing.
“Seek IP guidance early, but don’t rush to file,” she said. “Those are two different decisions.”
Filing prematurely can start the clock on costs before founders understand which elements of their technology hold the greatest commercial value. Waiting too long, however, can jeopardize protection if the innovation is publicly disclosed.
Her broader advice is to treat intellectual property as part of the business strategy from the beginning, while learning from founders who have already navigated university ownership, licensing and commercialization.
“The goal is to share enough to build trust and excitement, and protect everything that makes Tydra difficult to copy,” Varshney said.
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