A note before we start.
Hello, it’s been a while hasn’t it. Benny and Mat Lyon here, CEOs of your favourite branding agency Lyon & Lyon. You might be thinking things look and sound a little different around here, well, you wouldn’t be far wrong. We’ve been thinking hard about what we actually want to say and why. The result is Needed, a monthly newsletter featuring one brand we think the world actually needs that most people haven’t heard of yet.
What makes this extra special is that you’ll genuinely be hearing from us and the rest of the team, our true voice, no AI bullshit here. It might be messy, it might just about make sense, but one thing is for certain it’s 100% us.
Enjoy, and we’ll catch you next month. Benny and Mat.
The brand that plays music to microbes.
To kick off the first needed newsletter we’ll be talking to Johnny Drain CEO of biotech brand HypeSound. An extraordinary brand that merges two unlikely elements, sound and microbes. This UK biotech company uses acoustic frequencies to influence how microbes grow and behave inside bioreactors. Both mind-boggling and brilliant!
I first came across them at the Foodtech 500 event by Forward Fooding, a series of founder pitches with about ten brands going back to back. When Johnny stood up and started talking about sound waves and fermentation. This blew my mind and I think the rest of the audience were stunned too.
At the end of the pitch the obligatory question time came up. Clearly in awe and overexcited, I put my hand up and asked “what the sound actually sounds like?”, because I thought that was a missed opportunity in his pitch. After all, it’s what makes them truly unique. He laughed and said it wasn’t quite techno, more of an undulating set of frequencies, something like ooo-ee-oo rising and falling. I’m not sure I’ve ever described a sound less accurately but the room seemed to get it. Ha!
What I love about this tech is the idea that sound is everywhere, it’s how we communicate, it’s energy and movement and they have harnessed this to help grow microbes without chemicals. It takes the idea of talking to your plants to help them grow and most of us say it without really meaning it scientifically. HypeSound is basically the scientific proof that the theory was right all along.
I caught up with Johnny after the event and asked him three questions:
On how he found Hypesound:
“I was chatting to one of HypeSound’s investors about another opportunity and he started talking to me about HypeSound. I used to play a lot of music and so the company really sits at the bullseye of the big, constant themes in my life: music, food, science, innovation. And microbes. I was immediately intrigued.”
On explaining it at a dinner party:
“The trivial version is playing music to microbes. I usually draw the analogy of people singing to their houseplants to help them grow better. Most people intuitively understand that. We’re building a hardware and software platform that sends tuned acoustic frequencies into bioreactors to influence how microbes grow and behave. But we’re also using sound as a sensor, trying to infer useful information about how the cells are growing by listening to how the responses change.”
On what the world looks like in ten years:
“Sound will become one extra layer of control that helps industrial biology cross the gap from promising ideas to reliable, cost-effective large-scale solutions. Proteins, pigments, fats, materials, medicines, fuels, nutrients being grown using biology in more sustainable, resilient, low-carbon ways.”
What makes this so good is that it’s literally just nature helping nature. Sound is everywhere (obviously), Johnny and the team just figured out that if you point the right frequencies at a bioreactor, you can completely change the game. It means they can scale massive biological industries like biofuels, proteins, and skincare cleaner and faster, without throwing a bunch of chemicals at them.
Johnny Drain
Materials Scientist and CEO of Hypesound
That’s a brand the world actually needs
(cheesy ending but true)
P.S. If you want to see what we’ve been up to back at the studio? Check out our latest news for a look at our current brand projects, industry rants, and studio updates.
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We work with brands the world actually needs.
We don't invent stories.
We find the ones that were always there.
The product and the planet.
One story.
Brands the world actually needs.
We work with brands the world actually needs.
We don't invent stories.
We find the ones that were always there.
The product and the planet.
One story.
Brands the world actually needs.
We work with brands the world actually needs.
We don't invent stories.
We find the ones that were always there.
The product and the planet.
One story.
Brands the world actually needs.
