Sheheryar Khan speaks very fast in a voice full of excitement and a fair bit of incredulity. Less than a year after the Saint Mary’s University student founded Alaagi to make biodegradable, seaweed-based food packaging, the company is celebrating important milestones and working on new products

The company has secured over $12 million in commercial letters of intent, including pilots with Sobeys and High Liner Foods, received four purchase orders and won $165,000 in non-dilutive funding, the Halifax-based cleantech company recently disclosed.

Alaagi has also been named among the top 100 global startups by the Nestlé and UNESCO Youth Impact: Because You Matter program, meaning the nascent venture will head to Paris next year to learn about regenerative agriculture, climate change mitigation, and sustainable packaging. Alaagi, along with Square Roots, was also part of the SMU-based winning team at the Enactus World Cup in Bangkok.

“It’s exciting and also a lot of pressure …. People have high expectations,” said Khan, who is also CEO and who has just graduated from SMU with a BSc and DipENG.

To date, Khan has been working in a SMU lab with volunteer team members Tyler MacLean and Vaishali Sachdeva. He’s now looking to hire SMU students and professors who have expertise in chemical engineering to help develop more products. His current bioplastic film is soft and pliable and great for food packaging. He needs harder and more rigid bioplastics in order to exploit other markets.

“This (making compostable packaging from seaweed) is a relatively new technology. Everyone (the competing startups) is in the R&D phase and in a race to be first in the market,” he told Entrevestor.

Khan said there are companies in the U.S., U.K. and India that are also using seaweed to create bioplastics. He began trying to develop his own seaweed-based plastic after realizing that plastic pollution is a major health issue for the planet.  He said many bioplastics are made of foodstuffs such as sugar cane. Growing and harvesting such crops on land is costly and can end up diverting food to bioplastic production. So, he turned his attention to seaweed, which is plentiful in the oceans and is often seen as an invasive species, with governments even paying for its removal.

“I was prototyping in the kitchen in Halifax I share with my brother and annoying him,” he recalled. “This went on for months.”

Finally, he came up with a soft, flexible bioplastic that has a shelf life of two years and biodegrades into sugar molecules in sunlight within six months. He figured it would be good for food packaging.

His mentor Jason Turner, manager of the student engagement team at SMU's Arthur L. Irving Entrepreneurship Centre, advised Khan to start a company to commercialize his research. He did so, naming the new company Alaagi, which means Change in Greek, and establishing the new venture at SMU.

Then it was time to start entering pitch contests. This proved challenging for Khan. He is from Dubai where people tend to be reticent. Learning to pitch his technology and business has been a steep learning curve, he said.

He lost his first pitch contest because “No one understood what I said. On stage, I used macaroni packaged in our plastic as a prop. After I lost, I asked the judge what I did wrong. He said everyone thought I was selling macaroni, not packaging.

“But I kept entering pitch contests and I got better. Obtaining this experience in Canada has been huge for me. It has exposed me to so many opportunities. Eventually, I got comfortable on stage. The losses have been painful, the wins, joyful.”

Khan said that during the past year he has been focused on sustaining his business. Now, he must build it.

He is hiring people, and seeking co-founders who can help him pursue his B2B model with grocery chains and other corporations.

The new graduate and entrepreneur had expected to become a chemical engineer working in research. Now, he wants to encourage other scientists to consider entrepreneurship.

“Science students tend to run away from pitches and business but I’d like to persuade science and engineering students to combine their knowledge with entrepreneurship,” he said.

“Many do amazing work in the lab and write amazing reports, but being a bridge between entrepreneurship and science can make real change in the world. The archives are full of amazing solutions that no one has ever worked on.”