Ventranet
About Lukas
Lukas Schertel is co-founder and CEO of Seprify, a company in Marly near Fribourg that makes functional ingredients from cellulose. Its products replace titanium dioxide as a white pigment, including in food, and boost sun protection in cosmetics; a third line is aimed at coatings, paints and inks. The idea comes from the white Cyphochilus beetle.
Seprify was founded in 2022 as a spin-out of the University of Cambridge and the University of Fribourg, first under the name Impossible Materials. It raised a CHF 3.4 million seed round in 2023 and a Series A of EUR 13.4 million in 2026, with investors including Inter IKEA Group, Zürcher Kantonalbank and Cambridge Enterprise Ventures. The company won the W.A. de Vigier Prize in 2022 and was among the Venture Leaders Cleantech in 2023.
Schertel's background is in optics and photonics. He earned his PhD in 2018 in a joint programme of the universities of Zurich and Konstanz, then worked at Cambridge as an SNSF postdoctoral fellow and Isaac Newton Trust Research Fellow. Before moving to the company full-time he was a senior researcher in the physics department of the University of Fribourg.